On June 3, 2012, Lawrence Summers writes in Reuters Edition U.S.:
“With the past week’s dismal U.S. jobs data, signs of increasing financial strain in Europe, and discouraging news from China, the proposition that the global economy is returning to a path of healthy growth looks highly implausible.
“It is more likely that negative feedback loops are again taking over as falling incomes lead to falling confidence, which leads to reduced spending and yet further declines in income. Financial strains hurt the real economy, especially in Europe, and reinforce existing strains. And export-dependent emerging markets suffer as the economies of the industrialized world weaken.
“The question is not whether the current policy path is acceptable. The question is, what should be done? To come up with a viable solution, consider the remarkable level of interest rates in much of the industrialized world. The U.S. government can borrow in nominal terms at about 0.5 percent for five years, 1.5 percent for 10 years, and 2.5 percent for 30 years. Rates are considerably lower in Germany, and still lower in Japan.”
A long period of “adjustment” from entitlement, debt, and bubble-based consumption to “real” income-based consumption is in store for the United States. Consumer demand can only grow rapidly when we can reform the financial mechanisms to empower ALL Americans to participate in the private, individual ownership of future productive capital assets embodied in our business corporations and companies as the economy grows.
Binary economics and democratic capitalism, or what could be termed economic personalism, is founded on the principal that economic power has to be universally distributed amongst individual citizens and never allowed to concentrate. In simple terms, binary economics recognizes that there are two factors of production: people (labor workers who contribute manual, intellectual, creative and entrepreneurial work) and capital (land; structures; infrastructure; tools; machines; computer processing; certain intangibles that have the characteristics of property, such as patents and trade or firm names; and the like owned by capital workers). Fundamentally, economic value is created through human and non-human contributions.
In concentrated capital ownership terms, roughly 1 percent own 50 percent of the corporate wealth with 10 percent owning 90 percent. This leaves 90 percent of the people scrambling for the last 10 percent, with them dependent on their labor worker wages to purchase capital. Thus, we have the great bulk of the people providing a mere 10 percent or less of the productive input. Contrast that to the less than 5 percent who own all the productive capital providing 90 percent or more of the productive input, and who initiate and oversee most of the technological advances that replace labor work with capital work. As a result, the trend has been to diminish the importance of employment with productive capital ownership concentrating faster than ever, while technological change makes capital ever more productive. But because this is not well understood, what we as a society have been doing is to continually shift the work burden from people labor to real capital while distributing the earning capacity of capital workers (via capital ownership of stock in corporations), as well as borrowing (debt accumulation) to non-owners through jobs and welfare. Such policies do not function effectively.
In a democratic growth economy, based on binary economics, the ownership of capital would be spread more broadly as the economy grows, without taking anything away from the 1 to 10 percent who now own 50 to 90 percent of the corporate wealth. Instead, the ownership pie would desirably get much bigger and their percentage of the total ownership would decrease, as ownership gets broader and broader, also benefiting the traditionally disenfranchised poor and working and middle class. Thus, productive capital income would be distributed more broadly and the demand for products and services would be distributed more broadly from the earnings of capital and result in the sustentation of consumer demand, which will promote economic growth. That also means that society can profitably employ unused productive capacity and invest in more productive capacity to service the demands of a growth economy.
http://blogs.reuters.com/lawrencesummers/2012/06/03/breaking-the-negative-feedback-loop/
