You say you got a real solution

Eh bien, vous savez ...

Yes, the incentives given to business and investment leaders to motivate them to work harder and trigger growth benefit all. But are the incentives really market incentives, predicated on unfettered economic interaction, or has the system been fine-tuned to disproportionately benefit those who lead organizations, make investment decisions, and run boardrooms? It is true that governments have been unable to do much of what they should to improve the welfare of their people, and in a vast number of cases markets have done much more. But is creating a false choice between governments and markets, as so many politicians have done, productive or practical when neither can do the job of creating a thriving or just society alone?

Perhaps to distract myself from the insane maneuvering of my cabdriver—who, like cabdrivers the world over, was more focused on his cell phone conversation than the well-being of his passengers—I thought back to the conversation with Lawrence Summers at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Summers had suggested that the reason the most economically successful members of society are getting so much more might be that the world is actually becoming more efficient: The system is rewarding the more skilled at proportionally higher rates, giving those with access to technology greater rewards for their heightened productivity, and giving those leading enterprises of growing scale greater returns for their companies’ incremental growth. Unfettered markets are doing their job. Isn’t it possible, he was positing, that overachievers are now finally able to capture their fair share of returns given their relative talents, productivity, and contribution of value to economic outcomes?
p. 55

David Rothkopf, Superclass - 2008