How does the Cantillon Effect increase Inequality?

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The Cantillion Effect refers to the inequality that arises when some people get preferred access to newly “printed” money.

Cantillon also had a theory in which the beneficiaries of the state creating the currency is based on the institutional setup of that state. This essentially means, “he who was close to the king and the wealthy”, likely benefitted from the distributional choices of currency through the system.

As new money is created, the first recipients (known as cantillioinaries) are able to make purchases before the prices increases due to the purchases the cantillionaires make with the newly printed money.

The general rule is that those closest to to money printer benefit from a Cantillion Effect.

 

Example:

Blackrock receives a benefit when the Federal reserve purchases their bonds as part of Quantitative Easing.

Blackrock is able to buy up homes across the country at the old prices, before the price increases due to the purchases made with the new money.

To see the inequality at work, Blackrock then rents out the homes to young Americans (and others) who can’t afford to purchase a home at high prices.

The danger is that this inequality becomes entrenched when young people (and others) are unable to afford to buy a home.

 

Supply Chain

As supply chains deliver products, price increases are passed up the chain.

  • Chinese Supplier sells T-shirts to an American Supplier,for a $1 higher price
  • American Company sells T-shirts for $1 more.
  • American workers have to purchase the T-shirts at a higher price, but wait up to 1 year to get a raise.
  • In the meantime, the public are stuck paying higher prices at unchaged wages.

 

Who are the Cantillionaires?

Cantillionares are those people who benefit from their proximity of the money printer.

In a Bitcoin-based system, the Cantillion Effect would be eliminated because new Bitcoin is awarded through a competitive mining-process. Anyone can mine Bitcoin. There is not a special benefit from working for the finance industry or a company whose bonds are being bought by the Federal Reserve.

 

Since 2009, the Federal Reserve has bought or manipulated the market to support the issuance of more corporate bonds.  Rather than invest the proceeds in productive purposes, the CEOs of these companies divert the proceeds into stock buybacks.

They essentially go into greater debt (borrow money by issuing bonds) and use that money to inflate their stock prices.

The Fed “money printing” gives the CEOs and other corporate leadership an easy way to boost their stock price and “earn” their bonuses.

It also benefits stockholders, a group that dis-proportionally benefits the top of the income scale.

How an Engineering Student’s Question Prevented a NYC Skyscraper from Falling Down

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Citigroup Center

Engineering crisis of 1978 (from Wikipedia)

Due to material changes during construction, the building as initially completed was structurally unsound. William LeMessurier‘s original design for the chevron load braces used welded joints. To save money, Bethlehem Steel changed the plans in 1974 to use bolted joints, which was accepted by LeMessurier’s office but not known to the engineer himself.[22] Furthermore, according to The New Yorker, LeMessurier originally only needed to calculate wind loads from perpendicular winds under the building code; in typical buildings, loads from quartering winds at the corners would be less.[22][159] In June 1978, after an inquiry from Princeton University engineering student Diane Hartley, LeMessurier recalculated the wind loads on the building with quartering winds.[159][f] He found that, for four of the eight tiers of chevrons, such winds would create a 40 percent increase in wind loads and a 160 percent increase in load at the bolted joints.[22]

Citicorp Center’s use of bolted joints and the increased loads from quartering winds would not have caused concern if these issues had been isolated from each other. However, the combination of the two findings prompted LeMessurier to run tests on the structural safety.[103] The original welded-joint design could withstand the load from straight-on and quartering winds, but a 75-mile-per-hour (121 km/h) hurricane force quartering wind would exceed the strength of the bolted-joint chevrons.[99] With the tuned mass damper active, LeMessurier estimated that a wind capable of toppling the building would occur on average once every 55 years.[162][161] If the tuned mass damper could not function due to a power outage, a wind strong enough to cause the building’s collapse would occur once every 16 years on average.[162] LeMessurier also discovered that his firm had used New York City’s truss safety factor of 1:1 instead of the column safety factor of 1:2.[99] [Read more…]

How a lack of legitimacy undermines “Broken Windows Policing”

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In a 2011 New Yorker talk, Malcolm Gladwell described the central role “legitimacy” plays in motivating people.  Previously, political theorists had focused on “deterrence theory” that treats people as rational actors who decide whether to follow the law based upon a weighing of the pros and cons of compliance.

Protesting Illegitimate Authority

Gladwell cites NYU Professor Tom Tyler’s work on “legitimacy”, and argues that people will fight to the death and even go on hunger strikes against an authority they feel is illegitimate, despite overwhelming penalties that deterrence theorists assume would be effective.

Gladwell identifies 3 factors in establishing legitimacy:

  1. Does the authority grant one standing and listen to one’s petitions?
  2. Is authority administered with neutrality or is there one set of rules for one group and a different system for others?
  3. Is the system trustworthy — does it follow well-defined rules that are sensible and are not subject to arbitrary change?

[Read more…]