Global economy, domestic poverty

A must-read for today by Sean Starrs at Politico: America Didn’t Decline, It Went Global, in which the author discovers that the wiring of the global economy bypasses national interests, taking wealth from the entire globe and distributing through corporations to relatively few people.

American firms particularly dominate the technological frontier, including a whopping 84 percent of the profit share in computer hardware and software (despite China becoming the largest PC market in the world in 2011), 89 percent of the health care equipment and services sector and 53 percent of pharmaceuticals and biotechnology. Perhaps most surprisingly, American dominance of financial services has actually increased since the 2008 Wall Street crash, from 47 percent in 2007 to an incredible 66 percent profit share in 2013. In short, despite almost seven decades of increasing global competition and the rise of vast regions of the world (most of all East Asia), American transnational corporations continue to dominate the pinnacle of global capitalism, a phenomenon that national accounts miss.

More on what this means in today’s video blog, sponsored by carpal tunnel:

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