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Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else Kindle Edition
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Shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize
There has always been some gap between rich and poor in this country, but recently what it means to be rich has changed dramatically. Forget the 1 percent—Plutocrats proves that it is the wealthiest 0.1 percent who are outpacing the rest of us at breakneck speed. Most of these new fortunes are not inherited, amassed instead by perceptive businesspeople who see themselves as deserving victors in a cutthroat international competition. With empathy and intelligence, Plutocrats reveals the consequences of concentrating the world’s wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Propelled by fascinating original interviews with the plutocrats themselves, Plutocrats is a tour de force of social and economic history, the definitive examination of inequality in our time.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Books
- Publication dateOctober 11, 2012
- File size1334 KB
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"Mix crisp economics, ripe history, and two pinches of salty gossip, and you have the flavor of Chrystia Freeland's entertaining book. From the opulent Bradley Martin ball of 1897 to its modern echoes in Sun Valley and Davos, Plutocratschronicles the habits of the workaholic overclass--its taste for British public schools, its immodest philanthropy, its fundamental rootlessness. Even as she describes this gilded tribe, Freeland advances a paradoxical warning. Open societies may allow super-achievers to pile up extraordinary riches--and to feel that they have more or less deserved them. But the more these meritocrats succeed, the more likely they are to entrench their own offspring at the top of the heap, negating the very meritocracy that afforded them their chances. Already in the United States, graduating from college is more closely linked to having wealthy parents than to grades in high school. When class matters more than going to class, Freeland's message must be treated with the utmost seriousness."
-- "Sebastian Mallaby, author of More Money than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite""Our world increasingly revolves around global elites who not only have an oversized effect on our politics but also set the trends and furnish us with the dominant discourse. In this delightful book, Chrystia Freeland tells the story of how we got here and what distinguishes our elites from those of previous epochs. Most importantly, she explains why the elites' dominance, even when it appears benign, is a challenge to our institutions and gives us clues about how we can overcome it."
-- "Daron Acemoglu, coauthor of Why Nations Fail""Rising inequality is one of the most pressing issues of our time. Chrystia Freeland's Plutocrats provides us with a glimpse of the lives of America's elites and a disquieting look at the society that produces them. This well-written and lively account is a good primer for anyone who wants to understand one extreme of America today."
-- "Joseph Stiglitz, author of The Price of Inequality""The world's wealthy elite are more wealthy, more knit together, more separate from their fellow citizens and probably more powerful than ever before. This very important book describes their lives and more important how their lives affect all of ours. It should be read by anyone concerned with how their world is being shaped and how it will evolve."
-- "Lawrence Summers, former US Treasury Secretary"Sobering, if we can grasp the implications.-- "Library Journal"
About the Author
Chrystia Freeland is the digital editor at Thomson Reuters, following years of service at the Financial Times both in New York and London. She was the deputy editor of Canadas Globe and Mail and has reported for the Financial Times, the Economist, and the Washington Post. Freeland is also the author of Sale of a Century: The Inside Story of the Second Russian Revolution. She lives in New York City.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION
The poor enjoy what the rich could not before afford. What were the luxuries have become the necessaries of life. The laborer has now more comforts than the farmer had a few generations ago. The farmer has more luxuries than the landlord had, and is more richly clad and better housed. The landlord has books and pictures rarer and appointments more artistic than the king could then obtain.
—Andrew Carnegie
Branko Milanovic is an economist at the World Bank. He first became interested in income inequality studying for his PhD in the 1980s in his native Yugoslavia, where he discovered it was officially viewed as a “sensitive” subject—which meant one the ruling regime didn’t want its scholars to look at too closely. That wasn’t a huge surprise; after all, the central ideological promise of socialism was to deliver a classless society.
But when Milanovic moved to Washington, he discovered a curious thing. Americans were happy to celebrate their super-rich and, at least sometimes, worry about their poor. But putting those two conversations together and talking about economic inequality was pretty much taboo.
“I was once told by the head of a prestigious think tank in Washington, D.C., that the think tank’s board was very unlikely to fund any work that had income or wealth inequality in its title,” Milanovic, who wears a beard and has a receding hairline and teddy bear build, explained in a recent book. “Yes, they would finance anything to do with poverty alleviation, but inequality was an altogether different matter.”
“Why?” he asked. “Because ‘my’ concern with the poverty of some people actually projects me in a very nice, warm glow: I am ready to use my money to help them. Charity is a good thing; a lot of egos are boosted by it and many ethical points earned even when only tiny amounts are given to the poor. But inequality is different: Every mention of it raises in fact the issue of the appropriateness or legitimacy of my income.”
The point isn’t that the super-elite are reluctant to display their wealth—that is, after all, at least part of the purpose of yachts, couture, vast homes, and high-profile big-buck philanthropy. But when the discussion shifts from celebratory to analytical, the super-elite get nervous. One Wall Street Democrat, who has held big jobs in Washington and at some of America’s top financial institutions, told me President Barack Obama had alienated the business community by speaking about “the rich.” It would be best not to refer to income differences at all, the banker said, but if the president couldn’t avoid singling out the country’s top earners, he should call them “affluent.” Naming them as “rich,” he told me, sounded divisive—something the rich don’t want to be. Striking a similar tone, Bill Clinton, in his 2011 book, Back to Work, faulted Barack Obama for how he talks about those at the top. “I didn’t attack them for their success,” President Clinton wrote, attributing to that softer touch his greater success in getting those at the top to accept higher taxes.
Robert Kenny, a Boston psychologist who specializes in counseling the super-elite, agrees. He told an interviewer that “often the word ‘rich’ becomes a pejorative. It rhymes with ‘bitch.’ I’ve been in rooms and seen people stand up and say, ‘I’m Bob Kenny and I’m rich.’ And then they burst into tears.”
It is not just the super-rich who don’t like to talk about rising income inequality. It can be an ideologically uncomfortable conversation for many of the rest of us, too. That’s because even—or perhaps particularly—in the view of its most ardent supporters, global capitalism wasn’t supposed to work quite this way.
Until the past few decades, the received wisdom among economists was that income inequality would be fairly low in the preindustrial era—overall wealth and productivity were fairly small, so there wasn’t that much for an elite to capture—then spike during industrialization, as the industrialists and industrial workers outstripped farmers (think of China today). Finally, in fully industrialized or postindustrial societies, income inequality would again decrease as education became more widespread and the state played a bigger, more redistributive role.
This view of the relationship between economic development and income inequality was first and most clearly articulated by Simon Kuznets, a Belarusian-born immigrant to the United States. Kuznets illustrated his theory with one of the most famous graphs in economics—the Kuznets curve, an upside-down U that traces the movement of society as its economy becomes more sophisticated and productive, from low inequality, to high inequality, and back down to low inequality.
Writing in the early years of the industrial revolution, and without the benefit of Kuznets’s data and statistical analysis, Alexis de Tocqueville came up with a similar prediction: “If one looks closely at what has happened to the world since the beginning of society, it is easy to see that equality is prevalent only at the historical poles of civilization. Savages are equal because they are equally weak and ignorant. Very civilized men can all become equal because they all have at their disposal similar means of attaining comfort and happiness. Between these two extremes is found inequality of condition, wealth, knowledge—the power of the few, the poverty, ignorance, and weakness of the rest.”
If you believe in capitalism—and nowadays pretty much the whole world does—the Kuznets curve was a wonderful theory. Economic progress might be brutal and bumpy and create losers along the way. But once we reached that Tocquevillian plateau of all being “very civilized men” (yes, men!), we would all share in the gains. Until the late 1970s, the United States, the world’s poster child of capitalism, was also an embodiment of the Kuznets curve. The great postwar expansion was also the period of what economists have dubbed the Great Compression, when inequality shrank and most Americans came to think of themselves as middle class. This was the era when, in the words of Harvard economist Larry Katz, “Americans grew together.” That seemed to be the natural shape of industrial capitalism.
Even the Reagan Revolution rode on the coattails of this paradigm—trickle-down economics, after all, emphasizes the trickle. But in the late 1970s, things started to change. The income of the middle class started to stagnate and those at the top began to pull away from everyone else. This shift was most pronounced in the United States, but by the twenty-first century, surging income inequality had become a worldwide phenomenon, visible in most of the developed Western economies as well as in the rising emerging markets.
The switch from the America of the Great Compression to the America of the 1 percent is still so recent that our intuitive beliefs about how capitalism works haven’t caught up with the reality. In fact, surging income inequality is such a strong violation of our expectations that most of us don’t realize it is happening.
That is what Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely discovered in a 2011 experiment with Michael Norton of Harvard Business School. Ariely showed people the wealth distribution in the United States, where the top 20 percent own 84 percent of the total wealth, and in Sweden, where the share of the top 20 percent is just 36 percent. Ninety-two percent of respondents said they preferred the wealth distribution of Sweden to that of the United States today. Ariely then asked his subjects to give their ideal distribution of wealth for the United States. Respondents preferred that the top 20 percent own just 32 percent of total wealth, an even more equitable distribution than Sweden’s. When it comes to wealth inequality, Americans would prefer to live in Sweden—or in the late 1950s compared to the United States today. And they would like kibbutz-style egalitarianism best of all.
But the gap between the data and our intuition is not a good reason to ignore what is going on. And to understand how American capitalism—and capitalism around the world—is changing, you have to look at what is happening at the very top. That focus isn’t class war; it’s arithmetic. Larry Summers, the Harvard economist and former secretary of the Treasury, is hardly a radical. Yet he points out that America’s economic growth over the past decade has been so unevenly shared that, for the middle class, “for the first time since the Great Depression, focusing on redistribution makes more sense than focusing on growth.”
The skew toward the very top is so pronounced that you can’t understand overall economic growth figures without taking it into account. As in a school whose improved test scores are due largely to the stellar performance of a few students, the surging fortunes at the very top can mask stagnation lower down the income distribution. Consider America’s economic recovery in 2009–2010. Overall incomes in that period grew by 2.3 percent—tepid growth, to be sure, but a lot stronger than you might have guessed from the general gloom of that period.
Look more closely at the data, though, as economist Emmanuel Saez did, and it turns out that average Americans were right to doubt the economic comeback. That’s because for 99 percent of Americans, incomes increased by a mere 0.2 percent. Meanwhile, the incomes of the top 1 percent jumped by 11.6 percent. It was definitely a recovery—for the 1 percent.
There’s a similar story behind the boom in the emerging markets. The “India Shining” of the urban middle class has left unt...
Product details
- ASIN : B007V65OQG
- Publisher : Penguin Books; 1st edition (October 11, 2012)
- Publication date : October 11, 2012
- Language : English
- File size : 1334 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 325 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #892,366 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #386 in Social Classes & Economic Disparity
- #687 in Economic History (Kindle Store)
- #1,048 in International Economics (Books)
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This very readable book marshals a huge amount of information and background academic studies , and not only throws light on how factual are the relevant facts, but also on the pros and cons of various arguments about why things have gone bad, what needs to be done. She does not claim to present any new facts or ideas, but thanks to the high-quality writing of a good journalist, innovative ideas about shortcomings of capitalism of academics like Rajan, Zingales, of Booth Business School in Chicago ( YES! Chicago!) and others, are made more approachable for a very wide audience. SHe thus pulls together two central ideas.
First, "capitalism " and "markets " are not as most think necessarily the same thing. If there is private ownership but competitive open markets do not exist , or are limited in some way to the "few"--think of Russian oligarchs who have captured the state's politics and economic rules making new entrepreneurial entry into the market extremely difficult - this is NOT what market economies are about. The factual evidence of the book shows that in a much lesser degree, but still very problematic, the plutocracy-- especially the 1/10th of one percent multi-millionaires , have over time developed enough clout to influence tax-rules and business regulations to favor them more than small business or taxpayers. Not though a conspiracy or cabal as a couple of hundred oligarchs in Russia might be able to do, but simply because it is natural to use available power to "bend " the rules a little bit in your favor.
The second idea which then follows - and the one that causes her to be attacked from both sides- is that critiquing this lobbying and regulatory capture is NOT to argue for socialism and communism.. Citing Zingales "Capitalism for the People", Freeland pronounces a modern clarion call for properly done capitalism : it is not enough to be "pro-business"--you also must be pro-market." One could go back to the roots of pro-market philosophy and with minor modification recall that the greatest good for the greatest number of people, requires that two invisible hands of Adam Smith must work together: private capital ownership , and open competitive markets.
"Plutocrats" is an insightful look at both the economics and politics of the super-elite class. Canadian writer, journalist and politician Chrystia Freeland provides the readers with an inside look at plutocrats. It's an interesting look at how plutocrats live their lives and how they earn their fortunes, and the impact it has on the rest of us. This interesting 335-page book includes the following six chapters: 1. History and Why It Matters, 2. Culture of the Plutocrats, 3. Superstars, 4. Responding to Revolution, 5. Rent-Seeking, and 6. Plutocrats and the Rest of Us.
Positives:
1. A well-written, accessible and even-handed book.
2. A fascinating topic. Freeland should be commended for her ability to gain access to people from a very exclusive club.
3. Does a good job of explaining the rise of the plutocrats. "These three transformations--the technology revolution, globalization, and the rise of the Washington Consensus--have coincided with an age of strong global economic growth, and also with the reemergence of the plutocrats, this time on a global scale."
4. An interesting look at the rise of the Alpha Geeks. "The rise of the alpha geeks is most obvious in Silicon Valley, a culture and an economic engine they created. But you can find them everywhere you find the plutocracy."
5. Interesting perspectives on today's global economy. "Speaking at the same conference, Thomas Wilson, CEO of Allstate, told a similar story: "I can get [workers] anywhere in the world. It is a problem for America, but it is not necessarily a problem for American business. . . . American businesses will adapt."
6. The impact of women. "The year 2009 was a watershed for the American workplace--it was the first time since data was collected that women outnumbered men on the country's payrolls."
7. The power of intellectuals. "In the knowledge economy, more and more professions use a laptop rather than a steam engine, and that means that the superstars in these fields are earning ever greater rewards. The intellectuals are on the road to class power."
8. The three superstars of finance: Alfred Winslow Jones, Georges Doriot, and Victor Posner. "Hedge funds, venture capital, and private equity transformed finance--previously the dependable plumbing of the capitalist economy--into an innovative frontier where smart and lucky individuals could earn nearly instant fortunes."
9. When CEO salaries began to skyrocket. "The real takeoff was during the 1990s: by the end of that decade they were growing by 10 percent a year. As Roger Martin has calculated, for CEOs of S&P firms, the median level of pay soared from $2.3 million in 1992 to $7.2 million in 2001."
10. Good conclusions. "Pay for performance actually works, but only in companies where the board is strong enough to truly oversee the chief executive."
11. How to become a plutocrat. "Responding to revolution is how you become a plutocrat."
12. The changing economic landscape. ""It used to be that the big ate the small; now the fast eat the slow."
13. Great example of active inertia, Firestone.
14. The highest billionaire-to-GDP ratio. "Russia, with eighty-seven billionaires and a national GDP of $1.3 trillion, had the highest billionaire-to-GDP ratio. India, Rajan said, was number two, with fifty-five billionaires and $1.1 trillion of GDP."
15. Find out what was the largest transfer of assets in human history.
16. The richest person ever. "But all three are trumped by the man at the head of the 2012 Forbes global rich list, Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim. Forbes put Slim's fortune that year at $69 billion, enough to earn an income equivalent to the average annual salary of more than 400,000 Mexicans."
17. The impact of deregulation. "One reason the preeminence of the financiers within the global super-elite matters is that it highlights how crucial financial deregulation has been to the emergence of the plutocracy."
18. Important research. "In Western countries with significant legal corruption, that financial gulf creates a revolving door between the regulators and the regulated. One study of the SEC found that, between 2006 and 2010, 219 former SEC employees had filed almost eight hundred disclosure statements for representing their new clients' dealings with the agency, their former employer. Nearly half of these disclosures were filed by people who had worked at the sharp end of the SEC's relationship with business, in its enforcement division."
19. The facts. "Most lobbying seeks to tilt the playing field in one direction or another, not to level it. Most lobbying is pro-business, in the sense that it promotes the interests of existing businesses, not pro-market in the sense of fostering truly free and open competition."
20. A bleak future? Find out. "Low taxes, light-touch regulation, weak unions, and unlimited campaign donations are certainly in the best interests of the plutocrats, but that doesn't mean they are the right way to maintain the economic system that created today's super-elite."
21. Formal bibliography included.
Negatives:
1. It's very hard to be too critical of the very people who were generous with their time. Overall, Freeland deserves credit and she did her best to be even handed but it's human nature to hold back after such exclusive access.
2. The eBook did not link the notes.
3. Tables, comparative charts, diagrams would have added value.
4. The impact of the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act was only mentioned once in passing.
5. Not as analytical as I would have liked.
6. Not convinced of the following argument, "The two gilded ages can also get in each other's way. As good an explanation as any for the 2008 financial crisis is that it is the result of the collision between China's gilded age and the West's--the financial imbalances that are an essential part of China's export-driven growth model also played a crucial role in inflating the credit bubble that burst with such devastating consequences in 2008."
In summary, this was an interesting look at the world of plutocrats. Freeland's contention is that to understand the changing shape of the global economy one must look at the very top. She does a wonderful job of providing insights into this exclusive club and discusses the ramifications it may have on the rest of us. Perhaps this book was not as analytical as I would have liked but nonetheless insightful and fun to read. I recommend it!
Further recommendations: " Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class " by Jacob S. Hacker, " The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future " and " Globalization and Its Discontents (Norton Paperback) " by Joseph E. Stiglitz, " The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It " by Thom Hartmann, " The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality " by Branko Milanovic, " Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America " by Martin Gilens, " Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It " by Lawrence Lessig, " The New Elite: Inside the Minds of the Truly Wealthy " by Stephen Kraus, " Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty " by Daron Acemoglu, "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell, "ECONned" by Yves Smith, " The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do about It " by Timothy Noah, and "Bailout" by Neil Barofsky.
I found that the origin of the story, in the reaction to the restraint of the liberal FDR years, to be to the point. That this sense of restraint, constructed as not only a legal reality, but also a quasi ethical one, was broken somewhere in the 1990s, also hits the mark. Today's tilted "playing field" was the creation of the new American plutocracy, seeking only its own interests, apart from everyone else's. And she's quite good in this wide ranging discussion and weighing, of the balances between freedom of action, just compensation, meritocracy...vs. privilege, based upon money and power.
Freeland's conclusion, in comparing the temptations towards more greed and accumulation of the top 1%, to the Venetian nobility's closing of entry to new seekers into their ranks, in the Venetian Book of Gold, is I think, a master stroke of historic comparison. Somewhere along the line, the 1% is tempted to destroy the meritritious system which allowed their rise in the first place, which sets the condition for their own demise, as posited by Marx. Freeland, not particularly ideological in her reporting, notes all of this, and reports it as a warning of what could happen.
I found the book informative, thought provoking, and often entertaining.
Top reviews from other countries
I certainly would recommend the book, and I've been a globalization supporter these last twenty-five years as a professor of international strategy. There are always at least two sides to every argument and it's best to participate more as problem-solver and less as a cheerleader. Good book.
Para quien esta interesado en geopolitica y globalizazion.
Es ist auf jeden Fall ein interessanter Lesestoff, den man wie generell jedes Buch, stets mit kritischem Blick betrachten sollte.
Empfehlenswert.
Respected Berkeley professor of Economics Emmanuel Saez presents the following research findings on income inequality for the U.S. in 2010: Families at the top 0.01 percent made $23,846,950; that dropped sharply to $2,802,020 for those in the top 0.1 to 0.01 percent. Those at the top 1 percent made $1,014,089; those in the top 10 percent made $246,934. While the bottom 90 percent made an average of $29,840.
Meanwhile Winters, a U.S. political scientist, has created a 'material power index' (MPI), which measures the income of the 10 percent of Americans as a multiple of the average income of the bottom 90 percent. His material power index shows that income polarization in America gets sharper the richer you are: the top 10 percent have an MPI of 4 - meaning their average income is four times that of the bottom 90 percent - while the top 1 percent have an MPI of 15. But when you get to the top 0.1 percent, the MPI jumps to 124.
But who are the individuals that comprise this class of super-rich? what are their characteristics? and what catapulted them to fabulous riches?
The author dubs this class the second 'gilded age' as a parallel to the first 'gilded age' which related to the 'robber barons' of the industrial revolution. They are the multibillionaires of the present era corresponding to the multimillionaires of the industrial era.
I shall briefly and parenthetically discuss the industrial revolution and the multimillionaires it created in the process. The beginning of the industrial revolution concerned the mechanization that put the hand-loom weavers out of work and was a tragedy for these individuals, but it was part of a broader economic transformation that greatly enriched the country as a whole. The industrial revolution eventually lifted all boats, but it also widened the social divide.
The fundamental drivers of the rise of the present super-rich and the second 'gilded age' are the technology revolution and globalization - and the worldwide economic growth they are creating.
The present super-elite are overwhelmingly not individuals of inherited wealth but self-made men who had the right education - Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, or say a Harvard MBA - and happened to be at the right place, at the right time and had the risk taking personality to take advantage of the technological revolution.
To-day's era can be more correctly defined as the one of the twin 'gilded ages' because the triumph of the intellectuals is not confined to the West but comprises a truly global phenomenon. It is true that in the U.S. we have such iconic super-elite like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sergei Bryn, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberk but the highly educated are also in the vanguard of India's outsourcing miracle; the intellectuals, essentially their 'technical' branch, are very much in command in Communist China; and even the Russian oligarchs overwhelmingly have advanced degrees in maths and physics.
But the above, their 'embarrassment of riches' notwithstanding add value and wealth to the economy. By contrast there are elites who use their political muscle to increase their share of the preexisting pie, rather than adding value to the economy and thus increasing the pie overall. If the mind of the reader goes to the usual suspects that is the bankers and financiers, then he is absolutely right. As a prime example the author cites the Wall Street bankers who in 2008 and 2009 pushed for and got a massive bailout to save their companies - the biggest intervention in a national economy, as a percentage of GDP, since Lenin's nationalization!
So far we have spoken about the dramatic wealth inequality. I shall conclude the review by considering the 'increasing' part of the subject title:
The Great Depression inflamed the American masses, who imposed further constraints on their plutocrats: the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial and investment banking, FDR's New Deal social welfare program, and ever higher taxes at the very top - by 1949 top tax rate was 94 percent.
Between the 1940s and the 1970s, in the United States the gap between the top 1 percent and everyone else shrank: the income share of the top 1 percent fell from nearly 16 percent in 1940 to under 7 percent in 1970. In 1980, the average U.S. CEO made forty-two times as much as the average worker. By 2012, that ratio had skyrocketed to 380.
I enjoyed reading the book by the brilliant journalist author, her sparkling prose, impeccable statistics and her insight into the nature of the super-rich.








