The argument is largely tautological. It points out that the mega-rich have been responsible for the diffusion of important technologies. There is considerable truth to that, but this is because we have structured the economy in ways that allowed people to get super-rich by gaining control of important technologies.

If we had structured the economy differently, we wouldn’t have super-rich people responsible for its spread. For example, who was the mega-rich person for the near-universal acceptance of the polio vaccine, not just in the United States but around the world? This vaccine has saved tens of millions of lives over the last 70 years.

Its developer, Jonas Salk, never bothered to patent it, saying the knowledge belonged to the world. There is a similar story with insulin. The developers, Frederick Banting, Charles Best, and James Collip, sold their rights for $1 each in 1923.

Tens of millions of diabetes patients have been able to live relatively normal lives as a result of their discovery, but no one got rich from it. (This has not prevented drug companies from making huge sums by patenting various processing techniques and charging markups of several hundred percent.) We don’t just have to look to medicine. There were great innovations in most areas attributable to people who did not get ridiculously rich. It was not Steve Jobs and Apple who invented the mouse, although they did popularize it.

The invention was by Douglas Engelbart in 1963, a researcher at Stanford Research Institute. There is a similar story with DOS, the Microsoft operating system that has been used in billions of computers around the world. This was not invented by Bill Gates and his team, but rather by Tim Paterson, a software engineer working for Seattle Computer Products.

And the Internet came out of a military project, the ARPANET for connecting computer systems. No one got insanely rich from this innovation either. We have structured the system so that someone like Bill Gates can gain control over a technology like DOS, and become ridiculously rich by popularizing it, but it doesn’t follow that DOS, or perhaps a better system, might not have been widely adopted in a comparable time frame without someone like Bill Gates getting very rich.

The Economist piece is just looking at the ridiculously rich people of the last century and a half and implying that the innovations they are associated with would not have taken place otherwise. That is a logical leap bordering on absurdity. Capitalism Can Be Structured Differently To be clear, this is not a question of whether or not we want capitalism.

I’ll leave that one to others. But as I have argued repeatedly, capitalism is an infinitely malleable system. It can be structured in an endless number of different ways, some of which will lead to far less inequality.

We seem to have structured it in a way to maximize inequality. I’ll give some of my favorites below, but the list is far from comprehensive. I’ll also skip anti-trust for two reasons.

First, antitrust policy is an important issue, but everyone talks about it. With some notable exceptions (e.g. the lawsuit against Microsoft in 1998), the watchdogs have largely been asleep for the last forty five years, but they did briefly awaken under Biden. The other reason I am less fond of talking about antitrust is that it requires government action. (Actually, private actors can sue as well, but it’s difficult.) I like to focus on the ways in which the government actively structures the market to take money from everyone else and give it to the rich and very rich.

Government-granted patent and copyright monopolies This one always leads the list, both because there is a huge amount of money at stake and these monopolies are so obviously the result of government action. Capitalism is still capitalism if the government doesn’t hand out these monopolies. Patents and copyright monopolies are government policies to promote innovation and creative work, but there are alternative mechanisms that can be used.

And even if it uses these monopolies, they can be shorter and weaker, transferring less money from the rest of us to the monopoly holders. There is easily over $1 trillion a year in income at stake with these monopolies. That figure is over one-third of all after-tax corporate profits. The largest chunk is with prescription drugs and