ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
WHILE MY NAME ALONE IS ON THE BOOKS COVER, this work owes a debt to many people. First of all, my thanks go to my wife, Jill, who supported me morally and physically during this writing. I used to tease her that she never made it past page 10 of my previous book. She has more than redeemed herself in reading multiple drafts of this manuscript and giving me great encouragement and advice. It is not an overstatement to say that the book wouldnt have been written without her help.
This book owes a lot to the many wonderful co-authors who collaborated with me in the academic papers the book is based on. My professions greatest benefit is that I not only get to work with very smart people but also get to pick who I work with, so I can be sure to work with the nicest people. I took full advantage of this benefit. Much of my earlier work was with Raghu Rajan, with whom I co-authored the earlier book. I learned a lot from Raghu. All my work on trust and civic capital was done with Luigi Guiso and Paola Sapienza. Our collaboration has turned into a deep friendship. My discussion of the role of media is based on joint work with Alexander Dyck and David Moss, while the one on whistleblowers was joint work with Alexander Dyck and Adair Morse. My work on the effects of the bailout was with Pietro Veronesi, who retaught me how to price contingent claims. The proposal on how to curb risk on Wall Street comes from joint work with Oliver Hart. Oliver was not only co-author on some of my journal articles, my former dissertation adviser, and one of the best living economists but also an example of moral and intellectual integrity. When I have any doubts about what might be right or wrong, I find his intellectual guidance invaluable.
At different times both Brian Anderson and Yuval Levin asked me unexpectedly to write for their magazines (City Journal and National Affairs, respectively).Their willingness to take a chance on a little-known author is evidence that meritocracy is still alive in this country. Working for them encouraged me to develop some of the arguments contained in this book.
I also owe a great debt to Brian Anderson, Ben Plotinsky, and Bernadette Serton at the Manhattan Institute, who helped edit this book and were very encouraging throughout the writing process. I am thankful, too, to Adrienne Schultz, who edited the first version of the manuscript, and to Conor Dewitt, Peggy Eppink, and Erika Morey, and especially to Cecilia Gamba, who helped with fact checking. I also want to thank the Initiative on Global Markets at the University of Chicago and the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago, which supported these research assistants financially.
I benefited from extremely helpful comments from many patient readers: Kete Cockrell, Harry Davis, Alessandro De Nicola, Darrell Duffie, Steve Haber, Todd Handerson, Oliver Hart, Mario Macis, David Moss, Enrico Piccinin, Eric Posner, Richard Posner, Paola Sapienza, Amit Seru, Francesco Trebbi, and Stefano Visentin. I owe them a great deal.
My deep thanks go to my wonderful agent, Eric Lupfer. And finally, I want to thank my editor, Tim Bartlett. In teaching venture capital I learned that there are two types of venture capitalists: the value adders, who spend time improving a companys chances of success, and the option buyers, who regard their investment in startups as financial optionsyou do nothing and hope you end up in the money. The same, I have found, is true with editors. Tim is definitely a value adder.
THE AMERICAN EXCEPTION
For every migrant should well consider, that in a country like the United States of America,... where no princes and their corrupt courts represent the so-called divine right of birth, in spite of merit and virtuethat in such a country the talents, energy and perseverance of a person must have a far greater opportunity for display, than in monarchies, where the evils above mentioned have existed for centuries, and with their sad effects exist still.
F. W. Bogen, The German in America (Boston, 1851)
WHAT DETERMINES PUBLIC SUPPORT FOR CAPITALISM? A recent study shows that in any given country it is positively associated with the perception that hard work, not luck, determines success and negatively correlated with the perception of corruption. These correlations go a long way toward explaining public backing for Americas capitalist system. According to another recent study, only 40 percent of Americans think that luck rather than hard work plays a major role in income differences. Compare that with the 75 percent of Braziliansor the 66 percent of Danes and 54 percent of Germanswho think that income disparities are mostly a matter of luck, and you begin to get a sense of why American attitudes toward the free-market system stand out.
WHAT IS SO SPECIAL ABOUT THE UNITED STATES?
Some scholars argue that this public belief in capitalisms legitimacy is merely the result of a successful propaganda campaign for the American Dreama myth embedded in American culture. And its true that there is scant evidence that rates of social mobility are higher in the United States than in other developed countries. But while the difference in economic openness of the American system does not show up clearly in aggregate statistics, it is powerfully present at the top of the income distributionwhich also shapes peoples attitudes most extensively. Even before the Internet boom of the late 1990s gave us many young billionaires, one out of four billionaires in the United States could be described as self-madecompared to just one out of ten in Germany. In fact, in Europe self-made people are often referred to as parvenus (newcomers). This is a derogatory expression implying that such people are not as classy as those who have inherited money and did not have to work hard to earn it. In other words, in Europe wealth tends to be seen as a privilege, not a reward for effort.
Self-made billionaires also exist outside of the States, of course, but the way they have made their money is often quite different from the way Americas very rich did. The wealthiest self-made American billionairesfrom Bill Gates and Michael Dell to Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberghave made their fortunes in competitive businesses, not much affected by government regulation, whereas in most other countries the wealthiest people frequently accumulate their fortunes in regulated businesses in which success often depends more on having the right government connections than on having initiative and enterprise. Think about the Russian oligarchs or Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and Carlos Slim in Mexico. They all got rich in businesses that are highly dependent on governmental concessions: energy, real estate, telecommunications, mining. In much of the world, in fact, the best way to make lots of money is not to come up with brilliant ideas and work hard at implementing them but, instead, to cultivate a government ally. Such cronyism is bound to shape public attitudes about a countrys economic system. When asked in a recent study to name the most important determinants of financial success, Italian managers put knowledge of influential people in first place (80 percent considered it important or very important). Competence and experience ranked fifth, behind characteristics such as loyalty and obedience. These divergent paths to prosperity reveal more than just a difference of perception. Capitalism in the United States is distinct from its counterparts in Europe and Asia for reasons that reach deep into history, geography, culture, and the institution of federalism.
Historical Factors
In America, unlike in much of the rest of the West, democracy predates industrialization. By the time of the second industrial revolution in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the United States had already enjoyed several decades of universal (male) suffrage and widespread education. These circumstances forged a public with high expectationsone unlikely to tolerate evident unfairness in economic policy. It is no coincidence that the very concept of antitrust lawa promarket but sometimes antibusiness ideawas articulated in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.