000			01693pab a2200193 454500
008			180718b2008 xxu||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
100			_aHeise, Arne
245			_aThe political economy of meritocrtacy: a post-Keleckian, post-Olsonian approach to unemployment and income inequality in modern varieties of capitalism
260			_c2008
300			_ap.67-88.
362			_aWinter
520			_aThe "big trade-off", described by Arthur Okun some thirty years ago, is back again: equality or efficiency, or to put it differently, modern highly developed economies and societies have to choose between the Scylla of income inequality and the Charybdis of unemployment. Furthermore, it looks like the continental European economies - foremost Germany and France - sided with more egalitarian ends accepting higher unemployment while the liberal economies such as the United States and the United Kingdom chose higher inequality for lower unemployment. In this paper, it is argued that the trade-off is not a supply-side necessity to maintain work effort in a situation of incomplete contracts, but is a politico-economic issue of particular interest groups seeking rents. However, unlike in Mancur Olson's seminal approach, it is not the trade unions that are forming distributional coalitions on the labor market, but rather the meritocracy which is happy to use Keynesian-type demand management to advance their material interests by pursuing a "meritocratically optimal rate of unemployment" (MORU). - Reproduced.
650			_aCapitalism
650			_aIncome distribution
650			_aUnemployment
773			_aReview of Radical Political Economics
908			_aN
909			_a77892
999			_c77892 _d77892