[...]... joining the BRICs in transforming the world The group of Goldman executives who toasted Mr O’Neill in New York are in the vanguard of one of the consequences of the powerful economic forces he describes the rise, in the developed Western economies, of the 1 percent and the creation of what many are now calling a new gilded age In the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution and the opening of the. .. chief and those of his retainers The Indians are to-day where civilized man then was When visiting the Sioux, I was led to the wigwam of the chief It was like the others in external appearance, and even within the difference was trifling between it and those of the poorest of his braves The contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer with us to-day measures the change which... 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 Among students of income inequality, there is a fierce debate about which of the three is the most important driver of the rise of the 1 percent Ideology helps to shape the argument If you are a true-faith believer in the. .. wind in the sails of rising inequality.” THE TWIN GILDED AGES—ENTER THE BRICS On a bitter evening in mid-January 2012, a group of bankers and book publishers gathered on the forty-second floor of Goldman Sachs’s global headquarters at the southern tip of Manhattan The setting could not have been more American the most eye-catching view was of the skyscrapers of midtown twinkling to the north, and a... around the rising power of the global super-rich In a 2005 memo they observed that the World is dividing into two blocs the Plutonomy and the rest”: “In a plutonomy there is no such animal as the U.S consumer’ or the UK consumer’ or indeed the Russian consumer.’ There are rich consumers, few in number but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take There are the rest, the. .. wave of populist protest, ranging from the Tea Party on the right to the Occupy movement “These things have been going on for a couple of decades,” he said “What has happened is, with the rise of the financial crisis, all of these things are coming into sharp relief.” — The twin gilded ages are speeding each other up: The industrialization of the emerging economies is creating new markets and new supply... 1928, at the height of the Roaring Twenties But the biggest shift in income isn’t between the top 10 percent and everyone else—it is within the top 10 percent, Saez and Piketty found Almost all the gains are at the very apex of the distribution: during the economic expansion of 2002 to 2006, three-quarters of all income growth in the United States went to the top 1 percent of the population The social... in the top 10 percent made $246,934 Meanwhile, the bottom 90 percent made an average $29,840 Even among the super-super-rich the people on the annual Forbes rich list— the greatest gains have been at the tip of the pyramid A recent academic study of the Forbes list of the four hundred richest Americans found that between 1983 and 2000 all of the wealthy prospered, but the very richest did best of all... happens over the next year or so.” — Looked at from the international, Olympian perspective of the super-elite, the cost of these short-term “dislocations” pales in comparison with the transformative power of the twin gilded ages Mr O’Neill concludes his book with a heartfelt rebuttal of the gloomsters, with their emphasis on rising national income inequality and the hollowing out of the Western middle... investigation of the direct employment impact of the iPod is a case study in these lousy and lovely jobs—and shows where some of what used to be the jobs in the middle have gone The research is the work of Greg Linden, Jason Dedrick, and Kenneth Kraemer, a troika of scholars who in a pair of recent papers have examined how the iPod has created jobs and profits around the world One of their findings . reserved. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Freeland, Chrystia, date. Plutocrats : the rise of the new global super-rich and the fall of everyone else / Chrystia Freeland. p. cm. Includes. w0 h0" alt="" PLUTOCRATS THE RISE of the NEW GLOBAL SUPER-RICH and the FALL OF EVERYONE ELSE Chrystia Freeland THE PENGUIN PRESS NEW YORK 2012 THE PENGUIN PRESS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin. Globalization and the technology revolution—and the worldwide economic growth they are creating—are fundamental drivers of the rise of the plutocrats. Even rent-seeking plutocrats those who owe their fortunes