Research from Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow may help explain some of the anger and anti-capitalism sentiment that has cropped up in the United States in the last several years. Senator Bernie Sanders is incredibly popular among a segment of the population and he is not afraid to categorize himself as anti-capitalist and as a socialist to a degree that would have been unthinkable just a decade ago. From my perspective, many people feel that they have been treated unfairly by markets, and this lack of fairness contributes to the Sanders support, especially among young people.
Kahneman’s writes, “a basic rule of fairness, we found, is that the exploitation of market power to impose losses on others in unacceptable.”
My experience is that people are feeling the forces of market power in many different areas, and becoming discontent with their own economic standing and with feeling as though they are being treated unfairly by large market players. It may be that most people can still afford to buy more than what they need and to live comfortably, but on a daily basis they are faced with a barrage of unfair market practices. There may not be anything legally wrong with a market practice, and the market practice may be adjusting for real value rather than just collecting rents, but nevertheless, the exploitation of market power still feels unfair.
I spend a lot of time thinking about healthcare in the United States, and for many years the costs of healthcare and health insurance has risen much quicker than employee wages. With employees feeling their wages stagnate, unfair exploitation of market power can become a major outrage. This has been seen with drug prices as some individuals and companies have specifically targeted pharmaceutical mergers and acquisitions with the intention of increasing drug prices. Some medications have risen dramatically in price at the same time that many deductibles for health plans have shot up beyond the savings levels of most Americans. Even though a drug may provide an incredible value like saving a life or dramatically improving the quality of a life, an increase in price while wages stagnate feels deeply unfair to people. This could be a basis for our discontent with markets and capitalism (at least on the healthcare front), and a source of support for Bernie Sanders and his socialism lean.
When I think about it, I see this type of market exploitation beyond the world of healthcare. Ice cream cartons continually get smaller, the fun-sized candy is a depressingly small size now, good quality razors seem to be unreasonably costly with the cheap alternatives being effectively useless. Outside of smartphones, most markets seem to be providing less value for higher costs, and it is not hard to understand the frustrations that so many people may feel with markets and market solutions, even if they can still afford to live a comfortable lifestyle. For any given firm, exploiting market power is a rational and reasonable thing to do, but for customers, this adds up to an untenable sensation of loss, and a deep feeling that markets are unfair and should not be trusted. In a global market sense, it is as if we face a universal tragedy of the commons problem, but instead of a habitable grazeland being decimated, it is our economic wellbeing that is destabilized as each player in the market flexes more market power to impose marginal losses on each consumer.
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