In 2014 the top 10% of US households received 47% of total income, while the bottom half received 20%. In other words, the average household in the top decile took 12 times as much as the average household in the bottom half, before taxes. But social democracy is only one of the variants of what socialism could mean today. The twentieth-century variant (practiced in China until 1979 and in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe up to a decade later) combined political autocracy and central allocation of resources and raw materials, leaving the market only a limited role.
Those two traits explain why those systems failed. It is true that autocracy and a central command were reasonably effective factors in getting the Soviet Union B2B Fax Database out of its semi-feudal state in the 1920s and 1930s of the last century, when the key task was to make semi-employed peasants migrate from the lands where they lived. They lived in urban factories. Indeed, the rapid industrialization in this of the invasion of Hitler’s forces. But autocracy and fear of markets became heavy shackles when the more subtle problem of technological innovation became key to progress in the last third of the last century.
New model So what can socialism mean, apart from a social democracy or central planning? Let us think of a system of property relations in which the owners of large companies are not private capital, but rather those who provide inputs (labor and capital) for production. In capitalism, after workers and investors receive their wages and interest for their contributions to production, what remains (profits) is distributed to the owners (as dividends) or remains in the company’s bank account (as dividends). owned by their owners). In contrast, in what I call a sharing economy, markets would continue to allocate resources and companies would continue to accumulate profits, but workers and investors would receive all of the company’s income.