The Truth About The Trickle-Up Economy

“A big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body.”

Yes, the language in this Guardian article is bombastic—and the author might be exaggerating when he says this topic is “the biggest taboo” of our time—but it’s also an accurate, thorough, and persuasive dissection of the commonly held notion that wealth accrued at the top of society will generate wealth for all.

In political rhetoric across the board there exists a deeply entrenched, almost unquestioned, foundational belief that making it structurally easy for banks, giant corporations, and investors to amass capital will improve the lots of the rest of us. The author, Rutger Bregman, writes:

“Most economists, journalists, and politicians from left to right are quite happy to swallow this story. Time and again language is twisted around to cloak funneling and exploitation as creation and generation.”

Bregman distinguishes between two types of generating income: work (labor), and rentierism, or “leveraging control over something that already exists”. These two categories overlap, making it hard to distinguish between them, but in combination they have led to what Tom Goodwin has dubbed “platform capitalism”, whereby platforms that have no actual inventory provide services and charge “rent” for their use. These platforms allow capital to leak incessantly upward, against the supposed "gravity" of neoliberalism.

I’ve recently been rereading writing by the Italian feminist Silvia Federici on the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, and can’t help but draw parallels between the author’s description of our current economy and her description of late Feudal states. Bregman himself compares the revenue models of banking CEOs to that of monarchs (he also compares them to “vampire squids”). Such historical comparisons are of course oversimplifications, but they do support Bregman’s general argument: that we might not exactly be living in what we understand as capitalism anymore.