Currency Wars_ The Making of the Next Global Crisis - James Rickards [115]
Here is a phenomenon familiar to every first-semester microeconomics student—the law of diminishing returns. In effect, society asks its members to pay progressively more in taxes and they get progressively less in government services. The phenomenon of marginal returns produces an arc that rises nicely at first, then flattens out, and then declines. In this thesis, the familiar arc of marginal returns mirrors the arc of the rise, decline and fall of civilizations.
Tainter’s main point is that the relationship between people and their society in terms of benefits and burdens changes materially over time. Debates about whether government is “good” or “bad” or whether taxes are “high” or “low” are best resolved first by situating society on the return curve. In the beginning of a civilization, returns to investment in complexity, usually in the form of government, are typically extremely high. A relatively small investment of time and effort in an irrigation project can yield huge returns in terms of food output per farmer. Short periods of military service shared across the entire population can yield huge gains in peace and security. A relatively lean bureaucracy to organize irrigation, defense and other efforts of this type can be highly efficient as opposed to ad hoc supervision.
At the beginning of civilization, the research budget for the invention of fire was zero, while the benefits of fire were incalculable. Compare this to the development costs of the next generation of Boeing aircraft relative to the small improvements in air travel. This dynamic has enormous implications for the presumed benefits of increases in government spending beyond some low base.
Over time and with increasing complexity, returns on investment in society begin to level off and turn negative. Once the easy irrigation projects are completed, society begins progressively larger projects covering longer conduits with progressively smaller amounts of water produced. Bureaucracies that started out as efficient organizers turn into inefficient obstacles to improvement more concerned with their own perpetuation than with service to society. Elites who manage the institutions of society slowly become more concerned with their own share of a shrinking pie than with the welfare of society as a whole. The elite echelons of society go from leading to leeching. Elites behave like parasites on the host body of society and engage in what economists call “rent seeking,” or the accumulation of wealth through nonproductive means—postmodern finance being one example.
By 2011, evidence had accumulated to show that the United States was well down the return curve to the point where greater exertions by more people produced less for society while elites captured most of the growth in income and profits. Twenty-five hedge fund managers were reported to have made over $22 billion for themselves in 2010 while forty-four million Americans were on food stamps. CEO pay increased 27 percent in 2010 versus 2009 while over twenty million Americans either were unemployed or had dropped out of the labor force but wanted a job. Of Americans with jobs, more worked for the government than in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined.
One of the best measures of the rent seeking relationship between elites and citizens in a stagnant economy is the Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality; a higher coefficient means greater income inequality. In 2006, shortly before the recent recession began, the coefficient for the United States reached an all-time high of 47, which contrasts sharply with the all-time low of 38.6, recorded