A Fair Governance: On Inequality, Power and Democracy

Abstract

Can governments keep the pace of global markets? It is a defining characteristic of the present times, tested and measured within multiple studies, that we are living in an increasingly interconnected economy in which giant companies emerge and compete presenting new goods and products at a global scale. The competing environment of international markets produces quickly growing creatures that old nation-states struggle to understand, monitor and, consequently, regulate. In this regard, the selection process taking place in the market seems to be far more effective and greedy than the selection process we apply to our governments. In this paper I discuss the basic theoretical mechanisms for the persistence of wealth concentration, introducing a general game-theoretical framework to connect governance, market economy, and wealth distribution, and to rethink democracy and fairness in policy-making, especially with the aim of global sustainability governance.

Games in rigged economies

“…Empirical measurements of redistribution might help us map real economies into our framework, as has been done for similarly abstract models [22,23]. At large, the evolutionary stability of fair governance [13] is under scrutiny. In ecosystems that bring together wealth, people, and economic games, all subjected to Darwinism: What lasting structures emerge?…”

“…If powerful firms bend the rules systematically, regulatory capture happens [7][8][9] threating democracy at large [10,11]. As transnational markets grow ever more complex and faster, slow public bureaucracies might lag behind and abdicate into nimbler private regulators [12,13].…”