I hate all these conspiracy theories. And you know why?
It's because they imply hubris, arrogance, control.
Let's just realize that we all have a lot less control over our environment than we think we do, and some things are just forces beyond anyone's control.
I think it's more likely that every person at every link in the chain is following some incentive: financial experts within banks are saying whatever they think will get governments to stop putting up interest rates (we're in a banking crisis), journalists are repeating interesting and dramatic news from their sources (that we're in a banking crisis), their editors are careful not to block an important message (that we're in a banking crisis), and so on.
The net effect is possibly going to be moving wealth to the top, but if you take a conspiratorial view, the solution seems like it's "find the shadowy council working behind the scenes and force them to stop". If it's just distributed rational decision-making you have to take a systems-level view of what the incentives are and work to change the overall behaviour of everyone, which is a much more complicated problem.
People seem to have a hard time believing that organizations and people with large amounts of concentrated wealth would take coordinated actions to protect their wealth and ensure they gain more of it. They believe this counterintuitively, even when discussing organizations that are literally set up for the purpose of maintaining and gaining new wealth. None of this is a conspiracy, it’s just systems following incentives.
Coordination within a bank is expected, yeah: a banker will say whatever is financially advantageous for them, and this is exactly what we all expect. Conspiracies like "rig the LIBOR index in exchange for day-old sushi" exist and don't surprise anyone too much when they're found out.
Close willing coordination between a whole bank or a whole newspaper is less believable. Small-scale coordination is possible, yeah: PR firms pitching articles, revolving-door hiring, conflicts of interest, bias upstream in academia, or even an editor meeting a banker for golf and squashing a story; these things are all believable. These are not the same as a statement like "the news media is helping shift wealth to the top", or at least they have many caveats.
The rhetorical problem is that it's a sort of inverse of Yossarian's "they're trying to kill me", coordination is often not usefully distinct from a system which incentivizes the same actions that would be achieved through coordination. Some things are very hard to describe without sounding like a conspiracy no matter how little communication happens between actors, precisely because those incentives are a form of communication.
It's called a local maximum or prisoners dilemma. Ironically, the way out of a prisoners dilemma is coommunication and cooperation which implies that we are sitting in some mental prison rather than a physical one.
I mean the right-wing political parties are pretty open about their desire to keep the status quo economic system which causes wealth the move to the top (and in many cases increase the extent to which it does by doing things like privatising public industries, deregulating industries, etc). And they're obviously a coordinated entity by nature of being a political party.
To be fair, the left isn't much better. Sure their rhetoric might sound a bit different but they're still part of the boarder system. A system that as consistently failed the people they've been elected to represent.
It's a distraction to point fingers at left or right.
Your comment is not helping the conspiracy angle I was debunking up top so I assume we agree overall? There is no conspiracy, just random nature doing it thing and people trying to nudge it in their direction but frequently overshooting or undershooting.
What is a conspiracy here:
The idea of an invisible hand which is beyond anyone’s control, or the analysis of historical information which shows a pattern?
I choose to believe the data, not the fairytale you are proposing.
> What is a conspiracy here: The idea of an invisible hand which is beyond anyone’s control, or the analysis of historical information which shows a pattern? I choose to believe the data, not the fairytale you are proposing.
I have bad news for you... that's how it's worked from the beginning of time. People with power have... more power. It's not a conspiracy, it's a side effect of the need to centralize for efficiency.
Read something like Anarchy - the East India Company. Sheer luck got them to where they ended up, despite them being a) a literal "conspiracy" (a corporation) and b) bumbling fools on repeated occasions.
This might be true for most people, but those with billions have the means to control policy, technological advancement, incentives, and how that technology gets used. Small picture, sure, random walk, but zoom out and there is definitely a path most people are following without knowing.
I'm a history buff and I read avidly. 2008 and Covid don't really impress me after reading about the East India Companies (British, Dutch), colonialism in general, power structures in places like Rome, etc.
The data points to wealth redistribution but the causes are larger than some dark cabals. Globalization is the biggest one and globalization is such a huge topic not even 1000 CEO out together could begin to understand it.
The central bank has very little power over the economy actually. It basically only has one lever and it is akin to a wrecking ball. It's job is to clean up the mess, not control the economy.
>The central bank has very little power over the economy actually.
I disagree. Any organization that can unilaterally set interest rates and add infinite assets to its balance sheet (two actions capable of moving the largest markets significantly) has tremendous amounts of control over the economy.
The vast majority of people are just unaware how much of an impact monetary policy has on their behavior.
The business cycle is a well-documented fact of the economy, caused by basic microeconomics. The busts have as good a reason to be there as do the booms.
Plus the business cycle has booms which are on average much longer than the busts, an angle which conspiracy theorists frequently choose to ignore.
The business cycle is not a conspiracy theory, thinking the business cycle is somehow "made" or "artificial" or "controlled" is a conspiracy theory.
It's because they imply hubris, arrogance, control.
Let's just realize that we all have a lot less control over our environment than we think we do, and some things are just forces beyond anyone's control.