but most of us feel there isn't anything to be done

we're stuck with it because there's just no alternative

That's nonsense

there are plenty of good workable suggestion for reform

and here are four of them

We have to bear in mind that capitalism isn't just one thing

There are almost as many varieties of capitalism as there are capitalist countries

There are american, german, singaporean, swedish, danish, korean versions of the thing

The differences include the sizes of the welfare state

from around 10% of GDP in Korea to over 30% in Finland

The importance of state-owned enterprises

producing less than 1% of GDP in the US

But 22% of GDP in Singapore

And the power of trade unions,

with nearly 70% of workers unionized in Norway

and only about 10% in the US.

Capitalism has got dials

and we can adjust them

Think that Sweden, that supposedly high-tax-addicted country

only introduced income tax in 1932

two decades after the U.S.

and nearly a century after Britain

Or remember that the US, that pro-the-rich place today

had a top income tax rate of 91% between 1915 and 1963

and it didn't do them much harm at all

so we don't have to chug capitalism in a bin

the trick is to tweak and reform it in intelligent ways

When people hear of options to adjust capitalism

for the benefit of all

they tend to think

that sounds beautiful

but in the end the 'free-est' variety

that you find in the US

will ultimately outcompete the others because it's just superior

the argument goes like this:

the US variety maximizes growth by minimizing the constraints on wealth creation

which creates higher inequality

but in the end makes everyone better-off in absolute terms

than under a more equal but less dynamic system

but if you look at facts

it's overwhelmingly not true

that the freer varieties of capitalism grow faster

From 1955 to 1980, the time when regulations were much stricter,

The world economy grew 2.6% per year

For the next 30 years, the heyday of neoliberal economics

it grew at only 1.3%

In its miracle growth periods between 1958 and 1982

Japan, Korea and Taiwan

had governments hell-bent on dictating business activities

and it worked rather well for them.

Contrary to the popular belief,

that a large welfare state is bad for economic growth,

Finland, with the welfare state 1.5 times bigger than that of the US,

30% of GDP as against of 20%

has grown faster than the US

with an average annual per-capita income growth rate of 2.7% for the last 40 years

against 2% in the US

A well designed welfare state

with integral retraining and redeployment programs

promotes, rather than deters growth

Importantly, when people feel secure

they take risks

which is the life part of capitalism

"Secured people dare"

as the old slogan of the swedish social democratic party used to go

Unlike what some economists like to tell us

it doesn't have to be a hard choice between security and stagnation on the one hand

and perilous insecurity and economic dynamism on the other

It isn't some inevitable natural phenomenon

You sometimes hear that CEOs

need to have huge paybacks or they won't deliver the goods

but data consistently shows no relationship

between a rising executive pay

and executive performance

Then there is the claim that we redistributing wealth impoverishes everyone

but some of the most productive and wealthy countries in the world

redistribute avidly

Before redistribution throught the tax system

Germany in 2011 was a far more unequal country than the US

Germany's G.I.N.I.'s coefficient, an indicator of income inequality

in which zero means absolute equality

and 1 means absolute inequality

was at 0.51, higher than in the US, where it was 0.50

But after redistributive taxes

Germany's G.I.N.I. coefficient fell to 0.29

while the US, with a far more elite-friendly tax system

saw its G.I.N.I coefficient fall to only 0.38

Moreover, countries can limit the very ability of the market to generate inequality

through formal regulations or informal business practices

South Korea, for example,

has by far the lowest rate of inequality in the developed world

with a G.I.N.I. coefficient of just 0.34

But this didn't come about by magic

rather because the country has lots of regulations

protecting some pretty nice things

like organics farms, and small shops, especially bakeries and bookshops

And it has laws that keep CEO compensation low by international standards

All this preventing the full manifestation

of the inequalizing tendencies of an unfettered market

In other words, inequality is not the result of uncontrollable forces,

like technology or international trade

There are lots of tools that a society can use

in order to reduce it

and a lot of the wealthiest and most dynamic countries

are using them very wisely indeed already

The rise of the financial industry is a blight on capitalism

making it unstable, unequal and very short-termist

For example, in the 1960s

if an investor bought a share on a company in the UK

they held on to it for an average of 5 years

By the mid-2000s

the number had fallen to a mere 7 months

Faced with the radically diminishing patience of their investors

companies have done a host of nasty things

to make investors happy right now

at the expense of the long term

They suppress wages

squeeze suppliers

and chug back profit at shareholders, rather than reinvesting

Between 1950 and 1970, the hundred largest US corporations retained 65% of their profits every year

But by the 200s, they were retaining a mere 6%

vastly diminishing their own abilities to invest

for a properly succesful future

It's actually rather easy to encourage long-term-oriented investment

you just need to give greater voting rights and tax advantages to long-term shareholders

and you need to have sovereign wealth funds and national pension funds

representatives of the long term collective interests

using their considerable financial power

to back long-term-oriented corporate behavior

Above all, mergers and acquisitions need to be made more difficult

as is the threat of these that typically pushes managers

towards actions that please fecal short term investors

All these schemes may seem like pipe dreams

but they're far more tantalizing than this

They're real possibilities, alive in certain favored enlightened corners of the globe right now

There is no need to give up on capitalism

We just need to understand it a little better

and stand up to arguments that bully us into accepting its worst versions.