The paper you linked about inequality and discretionary bureaucracy seems very specific to the conditions of Indonesia: a highly bureaucratic non-democratic cou

The paper you linked about inequality and discretionary bureaucracy seems very specific to the conditions of Indonesia: a highly bureaucratic non-democratic country transitioning to democracy but not “transform[ing] detrimental institutions nor replac[ing] the existing official position of the previous bureaucracy.” It’s making a claim that the “persistence of bureaucratic clientelism” needs to be understood better when studying democracies, but doesn’t seem to be making a claim that clientelism is a driving factor of inequality in all democracies — rather, it’s claiming that it perpetuates inequality in countries that already have clientelist institutions before they become democratic. (Also, “a hallmark of socialist and progressive governance” seems to be your editorializing; the paper suggests a correlation between poor institutional quality and income development, but makes no claim that socialists and progressives automatically make poor institutions. I would posit that “clientelistic political parties in democracies” will wear whatever fig leaf is most likely to get them into strategic political offices: if the country loves socialists, they’ll be socialist, but in a country that loves right-wing populism, they’ll be right-wing populists.) At least going by the experience we’ve had in America and other Western countries, inequality seems to be an outcome of specifically deregulated capitalism. The whole push toward communism that we saw in the early 20th century was largely a reaction to the capitalism of The Jungle and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, and of course, the soaring inequality before the Great Depression. I think big business capitalists don’t give the New Deal the credit it deserves for cutting the American communist movement off at the pass -- changes in regulatory and tax policy shaped a highly-regulated market economy that at least partially flattened the inequality curve. Once we started deregulating all the things in the 1980s, inequality started growing again.