Branko Milanović: Cold War economics was an attempt to deny the existence of social classes

After the 2008 crisis, studies on income inequality gained momentum. Especially with Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, the concept of inequality, which has become popular both in academia and in the general public, seems to be a consequence of the disappearance of ‘middle class prosperity’ with the financial crisis and the austerity policies that followed.

Branko Milanović, for many years chief economist in the research department of the World Bank, now a research professor at the City University of New York, is known for his research on inequality. In his latest book, Visions of Inequality, Milanović takes the thinking on income inequality of six great economists (François Quesnay, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Wilfredo Pareto, Simon Kuznets) and examines how ideas on inequality have changed from the birth of capitalism to the Cold War and the present. Milanović believes that both the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the 2008 crisis have profoundly changed our understanding of inequality.

We talked to Milanović about his latest book, how the Cold War made the views of classical economists, also known as liberals, one-sided, and inequality research after the 2008 crisis.

You do mention in your book the lack of income inequality studies in both socialist and capitalist countries, and you mark this approach as ‘Cold War economics.’ I recently read a book from Samuel Moyne and he also called Cold War liberalism during the Cold War era. And he claims that the liberals themselves cut their past, their progressive past during the Cold War. So how did Adam Smith become a champion of free markets in the 20th century, even if he thought that the state administration is never given to the capitalists due to their narrow interest against the public?

I can split this into two questions. So let me do that chronologically. I’ll start with Adam Smith question and then I’ll talk about the lack of work on inequality studies during what they call the Cold War economics, because to some extent actually one really has to look at it chronologically.

My book, just to mention for those who don’t know, deals with the sort of top most important economists and looks at how they have actually looked at inequality. It starts with François Quesnay before the French Revolution, then goes to Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Wilfredo Pareto and Simon Kuznets. And then in the last chapter, which covers the period that you actually alluded to, from 1960 to 1990, the book ends at the end of the Cold War.

I think what is quite clear if one reads especially The Wealth of Nations is that it is a book written clearly based on the idea of self-interest, whereas the Theory of Moral Sentiments is based on the idea of empathy. People believe that the Theory of Moral Sentiments is pro-left, in the sense because it’s sort of softer.

But in reality, actually when you read the two of them, it is the opposite. It’s actually The Wealth of Nations is an extremely tough book regarding capitalists. It is a tough book regarding any type of organization. And the government is an organization. So obviously Adam Smith, as we all know because that part of another Smith has been propagated, is very hard on government regulation and on government trying to impose the rules that they themselves, people of the government don’t observe like for example corruption. They could be corrupt themselves, but they impose the rules on others that they should not be corrupt. Then it’s very tough on all as a set of associations, including organized religion. And it’s somewhat tough, but not too much, all labor unions, and I will explain later why not so much. But it’s extremely critical of any organized capitalist associations.

And that part of The Wealth of Nations is hardly ever mentioned because it is not something that the Chicago School and then the Wall Street Journal or others want to hear, but it is extremely tough and the reason is the following: He believes that of course capitalists are few in numbers, so they can coordinate much more easily than workers. Workers, thousands of them, millions, are dispersed.

But capitalists of course, are actually very few in numbers. They can coordinate better and they can have much greater influence on government policy because, as he says, they are sophisticated, and whereas workers of course are less educated, and they don’t have that access to power. So specifically, for example, he mentions that there should not be government facilitation of capitalist meetings. And this is so bizarre when you read that during Davos because it is a total reversal of the situation which existed even like 50 years ago that the government would not ostensibly go and show itself having a meeting of capitalist leaders. You know, the government had in those days to keep itself at least formally separate. But nowadays, as you can see, they actually are keen to go there.

So that’s what Adam Smith views in The Wealth of Nations and I would actually really urge people to read The Wealth of Nations, the entire book. It’s a long book, but it’s not a boring book and doesn’t actually go with interpretation, which is based on really selective excerpts from The Wealth of Nations.

But I think it is an important contribution, I believe, with the book to bring Adam Smith in a more truthful way, not only to go with the selected paragraphs.

Then the second question I will brief on that relates to the absence of the studies during the Cold War economics. Now I have to say something that was very interesting that you mention, is that I came up with the name, you know Cold War economics. I had no idea that Samuel Moyn at the same time totally unrelatedly came up with Cold War liberals. And actually I’ve read and learned about the book and I bought the book only after I finished my book. You know, my book I think was already published and I said wow, this is very interesting that we came up with a fairly similar, you know, title for either liberals or the economist.

For economics, my rationale was the following. To say that was only, neoclassical economics, which it was, is to some extent accurate, but it had something else. That’s something else was really a politically motivated attempt to deny the existence of social class. And that goes back to similar denial which existed in socialist countries, because of course they claim to have eliminated the capitalist class and then to have a classless society.

The US as we know was in an ideological and with other competitions; there was an ideological competition with the Soviet Union and also between capitalist and communist countries. So the US essentially claimed, which doesn’t come strangely because the US always claims to some extent to be classless society. But then the economics or the economists started claiming the same because the point was, ‘OK, neoclassical economics says to us that everybody has some type of assets.’ And then of course as you know they started using subscripts. For us, if there is no more capital and labor, they were all hundreds of assets, and they were subscripted.

And thereby the main dividing line, which is a very strong line because obviously to get income from one asset like capital you don’t need to work and to get income from another asset like you do have to work, this is a very strong line. And on top of that because the influence of the two are not the same politically, was that submerged, erased, ignored. So that’s why I believe to call it only neoclassical economics was not sufficient. We have to really put that prefix of neoclassical and Cold War economics. So that was my rationale for the name.

‘ANYONE WITH COMMON SENSE KNOWS THAT THERE IS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BILL GATES AND A BEGGAR’

In your opinion, best income distribution studies combine three elements: narrative, theory, and empirics. Your book follows a chronological order and I cannot but think that economics as a scientific discipline in general, and income distribution studies in particular, went through a regression, after Quesnay, Ricardo, Smith and Marx. For instance, mystification of economics was one of the main boarding points of Pareto, and it seems to me that this was coherent with growing nihilistic tendencies in other areas such as philosophy and sociology. Do you agree with that?

That’s an interesting point. Indeed Pareto is very often criticized because of his theory of the elites. As you said, for nihilistic tendencies and even he’s criticized for being at some point close to an ideological supporter or rather ideological progenitor of fascism.

But I have to say that I’m less critical to some extent ideologically of Pareto then on what happened during Cold War economics. Because for Pareto, inequality still was based on a prior distinction between what you call the elite, which nowadays is basically what we call the top 1%, and everybody else. What neoclassical or Cold War economics did was totally obliterate any difference. So the claim is actually more extravagant in the case of neoclassical economics, the claim is that actually we are all the same. The claim is that Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk and a beggar are technically the same. They are both individuals who are under the conditions of uncertainty, and given the constraints that they have and the endowment they have, they maximize.

Anybody with common sense would say, well, they are not the same. Not only that, their incomes are different and their wealth is different. Time horizons are different, ability to withstand, lack of income is different, ability to influence political decisions is different, perception of them is different from the people, so everything is different.

And of course Pareto would agree with that because he would place one of them in the elite and the other one into the people.

It is true that Pareto by his writings was like philosophers of his time. And actually I am not that familiar with that. But for example, one can maybe take Nietzsche, as that was in some sense very dismissive of any form of democratic organization, believing that all of them are essentially fake. There he says every elite has to justify through.

There are elites who are like lions who justify the rule by force and there are elites which are more sophisticated; they’re like foxes. They justify the rule through creating an ideology.

So yes, I would agree with you, actually an interesting topic may be to study from a more philosophical angle, because Pareto, similar to Marx, has a political side, philosophical side, historical side and economic side. So you can actually study Pareto from different angles, which I think can also be done on Smith by the way.

What I was trying to say is that Pareto mentions the power of myth. This is like, you alluded to fascism, we have fascism to exploit myths and lies. And Pareto also mentions if you have the power you have even if you know you are lying, you have to lie to balance the society. Also he is always dismissive about the so-called proletarian interests as you mentioned in your book. So Wilfred Pareto is a representative of this regression during the 19th, the second part of the 19th century in western world.

Yeah, I agree with that. As I said, I think actually this is something that should be done by others, not by me because of the philosophical topic.

I of course study Pareto much more as an economist and what he says about income distribution. As you know we’re still using the Pareto coefficient and he was the father of the first power law which we still use.

But it is true you mentioned that his view of the world is very much a reaction against Marx and the large workers movement which in his opinion is actually similar to Schumpeter in that he’s very much against it but he thinks that they would win.

So he sees actually the proletarian movement, well organized with people who are actually willing to sacrifice themselves and he makes the analogy between that movement and Christianity because Christianity won eventually because people were ready to be sent to the lions and to be killed and to actually sacrifice a lot.

He thought that bourgeois liberals were lazy persons.

Yes. Bourgeois liberals want to keep the society as it is, but they’re not going to go out in the street demonstrating and fighting the workers. And he saw workers and of course the organized proletariat which actually comes.

These are interesting links which are not explored in the book, but which also comes with Lenin’s idea that you have to have an organized and professional party which basically dedicates itself to the political movement and taking power.

So Pareto sees all of them as basically much stronger in their beliefs and consequently likely to win, but while accepting that he doesn’t like the fact that they would be. In that sense, he’s similar to Schumpeter. If you read Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, he saw the power of socialism and Schumpeter was of course always an opponent to socialism. In 1942 he essentially says, I think even in the first sentence of the book, socialism has won.

And of course Pareto also likes to shock very much. Maybe that’s another similarity with nihilistic thinkers of the time and maybe with Nietzsche, is that he definitely likes to shock bourgeoisie by making statements like that, that virtually every society in order to survive has to believe in a in a lie, in a big lie. That obviously included religion there as well. He saw religion is essentially a myth which is being created in order to maintain society.

Can we periodize the income inequality studies of economists you mention according to certain stages of capitalist development? I mean, physiocrats broke with tradition and regarded the wealth of the poor classes as the best indicator of wealth, the focus on class differences marked the classical economics, and with neoclassical and marginal revolution period inter-personal income studies arose.

You have summarized it, but let me just repeat that.

When I was writing the book because the choice of people that I took is basically based on my own writing over 40 years. I didn’t have any doubts except for one person and I’ll come to that in a minute. But as I was writing, I saw very clearly how the focus of inequality and actually I have to say that it is to some extent I am imposing sort of a view in the sense that people like Quesnay or even Smith, they didn’t use the word inequality, but I studied, like implicitly, how they view it, because they talk basically about factorial incomes, meaning, income from wages, labor income from interest and profits from capital and rent from landlord.

But the evolution is as follows. You start with Quesnay before the French Revolution, he introduces the idea of class. The classes are basically like the French classes before the Revolution. They were legal estates. So there were close like classes appropriate there which are composed of the clergy, aristocracy and government officials and they are the ones who received the surplus. So that was a totally new approach as if you see it’s very class based but it’s a legally defined class.

Then, as you mentioned, you have this sort of trilogy or three big authors Smith, Ricardo, and Marx that very clearly follow the definition of class which is based on economic ownership of different assets and of course legal equality, because legally of course capitalists have the same legal rights as workers and landlords.

Then we come to Pareto with this distinction between the elite and everybody else. 

And of course we follow the development of capitalism because what the big three offers are actually at the time of classical capitalism. Pareto is already at the time, as we were saying before, overreaction to that and the sort of more evolved capitalism.

And then we come to Kuznets in the US, where capitalism is sort of ignored this class aspect. He brings in the distinction between agricultural and manufacturing workers and rural and urban areas. So it’s an entirely different distinction.

Then we finally come to no distinction at all. So this is really the evolution. We really go from legally defined classes to economically defined classes, to the elite to the classes defined by essentially the type of work they perform and the place where they perform it.

I think that the last one of the evolution was really politically motivated for the reasons that I mentioned before. But they do correspond to the movement of capitalism.

SAMIR AMIN AND THE CONTRIBUTION OF NEOMARXISTS

I will mention only one person about whom I had doubts. I wanted to include him and I included him a little bit but not as a full profile, he was Samir Amin.

The reason was that neo-Marxists and Samir Amin brought a new look at inequality domestically as being influenced by external forces. And nobody that I mentioned before had this view until neo-Marxist economists because inequality is the result of internal forces.

But then, with Samir Amin, inequality, for example, in Egypt is the result of foreign forces favoring a given type of inequality domestically and that type is then maintained because it is actually good for whatever the capitalist global order. So that was an entirely new view that Samir Amin brought. I was considering having this number seven, but for many reasons, actually I did not. But he’s still in the book.

What can those six economists say about today’s inequality studies? For example, is Adam Smith the moralist, who denounces and reprimands the moral deficiencies of the rich but never questions their right to be on top, or Adam Smith the scientist, who openly criticizes the rich and how they acquire their wealth, suitable for post-neoliberal inequality studies? Recently, I read an article about the resurrection of elites against elites, rich anti-woke figures against rich woke figures in New Yorker (which also mentions your book). Does that mean Pareto is more relevant than the others? Or let’s talk about Kuznets and his thesis about the rapid increase in inequalities with industrialization and today’s ‘re-industrialization’ or ‘green transformation’ debates.

Well, that’s a very good question. I actually think all of them are relevant in some way.

Let me start with Kuznets. When Kuznets defined his famous inverted U-shaped curve, he obviously knew only the situation up to 1955, or actually 1960s, because he still continued writing. But you can apply the same logic of the industrial revolution or technological revolution to the later revolutions, including today’s. You could actually argue that we are now going through the upward cycle of the new Kuznets wave, which is not dissimilar from the upward cycle of the previous Kuznets wave.

But clearly Kuznets, having seen only one revolution, did not expand that to two or three or five. But we have seen two or three. So I think we can use Kuznets to actually claim that similar developments can be seen in the future as well. What I want to say simply is that if you see one phenomenon once, it’s very, very difficult to generalize that. But if you see the same phenomenon twice, from number 2 to number 3 is not a big jump. So I think he’s also relevant.

I believe as you mentioned Pareto as well, because of the book that you alluded to. I think it’s the End Times by Peter Turchin, which actually talks about the conflict of the elites within the elites. Pareto has actually two different elites. Turchin also has two, but it’s a little bit different.

It’s an interesting comparison, but let me go back to Adam Smith because I’m giving the Adam Smith lecture pretty soon and I really would like to emphasize this. Very important points from Adam Smith are: number 1 is that the welfare of the largest group is the objective economic policy and that was new at that time. Secondly, all organized associations have to be looked at with a skeptical eye. And third, capitalists should not rule economic policy because their interests very often go against the public. I think these are really very important messages from The Wealth of Nations.

And when you speak of Adam Smith the Moralist, I really have come to think of all the Theory of Moral Sentiments as a job market paper that Adam Smith did. Because it actually pushes all the right tones for somebody who is a professor of basically jurisprudence and who actually himself is divided on the organized. He’s against organized religion, but his religious feelings can not be fully expressed. As we know, he really remained very ambivalent, at least in public. And so it is a book, a paper that shows him as a theistic philosopher who is actually a moral philosopher, and does all the things that are expected from him to defend in a very sophisticated way. But in The Wealth of Nations, he doesn’t. He’s no longer writing a job market paper. He’s writing really what he believes and what is actually the result of having observed the world for you know, at that time he was more than 50. And so I think it is a very different view of the world.

I would actually really tend to see The Wealth of Nations as a significant, much more superior book to than to the Theory of Moral Sentiments. Because I think just the last point, he was young, rapidly young and he needed to show that he would actually follow the conventions. Young people when they write the job market paper they don’t go into the area which is really going to shock somebody. They used methodology and the topics that are very standard.

‘WITH THE 2008 CRISIS, THE MIDDLE CLASSES REALIZED THEIR ILLUSIONS’

One of the most interesting parts of your book is that when you mention geopolitics of the Cold War era, the turn taken in economics towards obstruction and the funding of research by the rich. It is a little bit surprising when one reads that the idol of liberalism, Adam Smith, thought that the rich people come together from time to time to force their interest over the society. You write that the right-wing financial operatives have established an ‘integrated system of knowledge creation’ during the Cold War. What about now? In ‘Epilogue’, you imply that the rearise of inequality studies is related to the middle classes’ dire situation after the financial crisis. What are real economical and political motives behind this phenomena?

I actually think that the current situation is quite different from this Cold War economics. And I think it’s different for two reasons.

First of all, the end of communism in the Soviet Union. There was no longer the need on the capitalist or the US side to insist so much on the classless aspect of their society because the other side simply disappeared. So that gives you much greater freedom politically to actually go in the directions that politically were difficult before.

Secondly, I think that as always they are important political or economic turning points that make a difference. The 2008 crisis was important for the study of inequality because it brought realization to the mass of people, to the middle class people, that what they believed, increasing standard of living, was to some extent an illusion built particularly in the United States, on the ability to borrow.

As you know, the household loans were actually more than 100% of the GDP and people could borrow very easily. George W. Bush actually started saying that everybody should borrow to have a house. And people who had no jobs or kind of random jobs and no incomes were actually also able to borrow, which of course was also propagated by the rich people and the banking system. Practically everybody participated in that.

As we actually know that quite well, the banks were interested in packaging the loans and getting the fees and the rich people had access to monetary balances which they had to pay somewhere. But then the whole thing crashed in 2008, and it could be much worse, obviously, were it not for the ability of the government to print money and to basically bail the banks out.

But for the middle class, it was a big awakening because the top 1% actually did pretty well. And then came also the issue of China outsourcing of jobs and so forth. So, that economic shock was something that opened the gates to the study of income distribution.

And of course [Thomas] Piketty’s book was a big contributor. But one should not forget this: Like everything, every time in history, a certain ideological trend is successful when it comes on the terrain, which is ready for it.

If Piketty’s book was written in 2005, the terrain was not ready, it would be there and maybe some people would read it, some people would not. But there would be nothing similar to what’s happening in 2013.

And the third one is the ideological, new ideological view of income distribution.

You did your Ph.D. at the University of Belgrade in 1987 on economic inequality in Yugoslavia. According to your own experience, do you think that Marx or Pareto was right regarding socialist countries?

The question is very difficult. To some extent socialist countries did replicate two things that Marx did not believe they would actually have.

The first one, they did create a new, different but new class society where it was not access to capital which mattered because the capital was nationalized, but access to the bureaucratic hierarchy that was to some extent like a new class.

Secondly, but on that I’m less convinced, there was of course income inequality in socialist countries. But it is true that that inequality was less than in the equivalent capitalist countries. So yes, they have reduced inequality, they have not reduced it to a minimum.

But on that part, I think it’s difficult to say, because Marx believed that once the underlying institutions are right, which means the underlying institutions do not have private ownership of capital, that income distribution would become an important topic. But that inherently it could not be high because you don’t have private capital, because everybody has access to schooling, because manual labour would be sort of more valued relative to the intellectual labour. In some sense he was right there.

But I think Pareto was right that there was a new class being created.