The Captured Economy

How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality

By: Brink Lindsey, Steven M. Teles

Narrated by: Shawn Compton

Length: 6 hrs and 26 mins

Publisher's Summary

For years, America has been plagued by slow economic growth and increasing inequality. Yet economists have long taught there is a trade-off between equity and efficiency - that is, between making a bigger pie and dividing it more fairly. That is why our current predicament is so puzzling: today, we are faced with both a stagnating economy and sky-high inequality.  

In The Captured Economy, Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles identify a common factor behind these twin ills: breakdowns in democratic governance that allow wealthy special interests to capture the policymaking process for their own benefit. They document the proliferation of regressive regulations that redistribute wealth and income up the economic scale while stifling entrepreneurship and innovation. When the state entrenches privilege by subverting market competition, the trade-off between equity and efficiency no longer holds. 

Over the past four decades, new regulatory barriers have worked to shield the powerful from the rigors of competition, thereby inflating their incomes - sometimes to an extravagant degree. Lindsey and Teles detail four of the most important cases: subsidies for the financial sector's excessive risk taking, overprotection of copyrights and patents, favoritism toward incumbent businesses through occupational licensing schemes, and the NIMBY-led escalation of land-use controls that drive up rents for everyone else.  

Freeing the economy from regressive regulatory capture will be difficult. Lindsey and Teles are realistic about the chances for reform, but they offer a set of promising strategies to improve democratic deliberation and open pathways for meaningful policy change. An original and counterintuitive interpretation of the forces driving inequality and stagnation, The Captured Economy is a "must-listen" for anyone concerned about America's mounting economic problems and the social tensions they are sparking.

©2017 Oxford University Press (P)2018 Tantor

Interesting thesis, mediocre narrator

While the thesis is interesting and I’m glad to have listen to it, the narrator was fairly dry and mispronounced several words in a jarring way. The producers really should have caught that and re-recorded those sections.

Important insights but not a page turner

This book does a pretty good job of explaining why we don’t live in a democracy. It gives some possible solutions. It’s better at what needs to be done rather than help that would ever come about. There are basically no checks and balances on lobbying so the people that can afford the lobbyists run the show at least where their interests are concern.

Gets you thinking!

Fell off in the end with their suggestions for how to improve the economy, but otherwise was a very intriguing analysis.

Could barely get through the first chapter

The authors clearly attempt to claim a rational, objective ‘centre ground’ in building their narrative and their theory. They go about this in a way that fundamentally undermines the work across multiple axes, including a use of political terminology that wouldn’t hold up in an AP Politics class and by blatantly misstating - strawmanning - arguments made in some very high-profile works. For instance, effectively insisting that Piketty claims government interference in an economy is never detrimental. He makes no such claim.