Brink Lindsey: belief

Transcript context

…Thank you, Steve. And now we switch to Brink Lindsey, another of the authors of “The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality” and Brink is Vice President and Director of The Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center. My first question, Brink, I also asked Steve this but when we look at income inequality in America today, how much of it is due to bad policy versus being due to some kind of skills gap or cognitive gap or otherwise human capital deficiency? And how do we know? I don’t think we can quantify it. I would say a significant chunk of high-end inequality, that is, the percentage of total income that’s accounted for by the top 1% of earners, is due to bad policy. Some significant chunk. It’s non-trivial. So that if all of these policies that currently artificially inflate top-end incomes were reformed, the percentage of total income going to the top 1% would be significantly lower than it is today. But more specificity than that, I don’t think it’s within the realm of social science to offer a credible answer. And I would say that this is on top of underlying significant trends that would be delivering a more unequal distribution of income, even if policies were perfect. Let me ask you about the Gordon Tullock paradox, which I’m sure you know of. But Tullock pointed out that government seems to hand out so many goodies, and yet the amount of resources spent on lobbying, although it doesn’t seem that way here in Arlington, it’s actually quite small relative to GDP. Doesn’t that imply that rent-seeking costs are low and thus the share of rent income going to the top 1% is gonna be low as well?…

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