关键词: 财富分配差距, 技术-经济范式, 金融资本主义

Abstract: Thomas Piketty has made outstanding contributions to the measurement of wealth distribution, but the model to explain the wealth distribution gap in his well-known book is essentially a simplified heterogeneous agent Ramsey model. The heterogeneous agent Ramsey model attributes the wealth distribution to the utility maximization of household decisions while ignoring long-term changes in the economic environment. Neo-Schumpeterians investigate the wealth distribution within the framework in which technology interacts with the institution while ignoring the impact of economic policies on the wealth distribution. Based on the Marxist political economy, this paper analyzes the continuous expansion of the wealth distribution gap in the United States since the 1970s from a perspective that the market, government and households interact with each other. The increasing wealth distribution gap in the United States can be explained as follows: under the institutional framework with the capitalist state power and the market economy based on the capitalist private ownership, the capital-biased institutional system further accelerates the disorderly and excessive expansion of capital and aggravates the continuous expansion of the income and wealth distribution gap, and thus the trend of economic polarization has become increasingly prominent; economic polarization intensifies political polarization, which enables the monopoly capitalist class to strengthen the capital-biased institutional system, forming a positive feedback closed loop; the wide distribution gap is transmitted between generations through physical capital, human capital, and social capital factors, which is called “patrimonial capitalism” by Piketty.

Key words: wealth distribution, technoeconomic paradigm, financial capitalism, common prosperity