Money is about more than just survival

There is little surprise that Bernie Sanders in his book, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, has blamed unfettered capitalism for an unprecedented level of income and wealth inequality. Recently, in an “adversarial collaboration,” Kahneman, Killingsworth, and Barbara Mellers reanalysed the experience sample data and discovered that the flattening pattern only affected 20% of the population, who were the least happy. Political scientist Martin Gilens found in his ground-breaking study in 2012, that in the U.S., actual policy outcomes strongly reflect the preferences of the most affluent but exhibit little relationship to the preferences of Americans with poor or middle incomes. Page examined data sets that included measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues and discovered that while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence, economic elites and organised groups representing business interests do. “ne might get the impression that policy outcomes resemble a coin toss — essentially random,” said Persson and Sundell in the European context.