Inequality, financialization, and political disintegration

Alberto Russo

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Drawing on Peter Turchin’s structural-demographic theory, this paper provides a preliminary examination of how rising inequality and financial liberalization contribute to political instability through the interplay of mass immiseration and elite overproduction. We capture these dynamics through a simplified agent-based macroeconomic model, introducing two structural shocks - growing inequality and financial liberalization - that reflect the transformations reshaping advanced economies in recent decades, a process intertwined with political disintegration. A wealth tax on the richest households can reduce political fragmentation and improve economic performance, but lasting resilience will require embedding such measures within a broader rethinking of the policy paradigm that has prevailed since the 1980s.

Keywords: growing inequality; financial liberalization; political instability; agent-based model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C63 D31 E02 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-10-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-hme and nep-pke
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/126357/1/MPRA_paper_126357.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Inequality, Financialization, and Political Disintegration (2025)
Working Paper: Inequality, financialization, and political disintegration (2025)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:126357

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().