Free The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government by Eric Liu, Nick Hanauer

unequally distributed. But in their view, income inequality has much more to do with the inexorable nature of complex adaptive systems like markets to result in self-reinforcing concentrations of advantage and disadvantage. This necessitates government action to counter the unfairness and counterproductive effects of concentration.
    Machine view: Wealth is created through competition and by the pursuit of narrow self-interest
    Garden view: Wealth is created through trust and cooperation
    Where traditionalists put individual selfishness on a moral pedestal, complexity economists show that norms of unchecked selfishness kill the one thing that determines whether a society can generate (let alone fairly allocate) wealth and opportunity: trust. Trust creates cooperation, and cooperation is what creates win-win outcomes. High-trust networks thrive; low-trust ones fail. And when greed and self-interest are glorified above all, high-trust networks become low-trust. See : Afghanistan.
    Machine view: Wealth = individuals accumulating money
    Garden view: Wealth = society creating solutions
    One of the simple and damning limitations of traditional economics is that it can’t really explain how wealth gets generated. It simply assumes wealth. And it treats money as the sole measure of wealth. Complexity economics, by contrast, says that wealth is solutions : knowledge applied to solve problems. Wealth is created when new ideas—inventing a wheel, say, or curing cancer—emerge from a competitive, evolutionary environment. In the same way, the greatness of a garden comes not just in the sheer volume but also in the diversity and usefulness of the plants it contains.
    In other words, money accumulation by the rich is not the same as wealth creation by a society. If we are serious about creating wealth, our focus should not be on taking care of the rich so that their money trickles down; it should be on making sure everyone has a fair chance—in education, health, social capital, access to financial capital—to create new information and ideas. Innovation arises from a fertile environment that allows individual genius to bloom and that amplifies individual genius, through cooperation, to benefit society. Extreme concentration of wealth kills prosperity in precisely the same way that untended weeds overrun and then kill gardens.
 
     
     

    MARKETS: Machinebrain View
     

 
 
     
     

    MARKETS: Gardenbrain View
     

 
    Wealth creation is maximized only by maximizing the number of robust diverse competitors in the market. The more potentially “fit” players you can field, the more likely your team is to succeed. Equality of opportunity, then, isn’t just a moral imperative. It’s an economic imperative. Making sure everyone gets a fair shot isn’t being nice; it’s bowing to necessity. Unfortunately, the politics of the last three decades has led to a concentration of wealth without modern precedent that has undermined equality of opportunity and thus limited our overall economic potential.

Inequality and Economic Crisis
     
    The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, under the banner of “limited government” and “trickle-down economics,” marked the start of a Thirty Years War against the middle class. Since then, the share of income the richest 1 percent earn has gone from 8.5 percent to 24 percent while the bottom 50 percent of Americans have seen their share drop from 18 percent to just 12.5 percent. If this trend continues, by 2040, the top 1 percent will garner 37 percent of the income and the bottom 50 percent just 6 percent of total income! At that point or well before it, our economy will have collapsed. In the meantime, we are at a level of wealth concentration not seen since just before the Depression, while tax rates on the top earners are at their lowest in decades.
    What have been the costs of this imbalance? In November 2010, IMF economists Michael Kumhof and Romain Rancière published a seminal paper arguing