I suspect Stephen's interview will be somewhat frustrating. It's Reuters Editor Chrystia Freeland with her book Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. Here's the Kirkus review:
Exploration of the increase in global economic inequality.
You don’t need a CPA to know which way the wind blows. Unless you’re one of the rich or superrich, the 1 percent or the 1 percent of the 1 percent, then you won’t be comforted to know that it blows against you: The rich are getting richer, and the rest of us…well, not so much. Thus the overarching theme of Thomson Reuters digital editor Freeland’s (Sale of the Century: The Inside Story of the Second Russian Revolution, 2000) latest book, much of which, at least superficially, isn’t really news. Dig deeper, though, and the author offers fresh takes on many key points. Are the rich happy? You’d think that all that money would take some of the burden off, but income inequality is an uncomfortable subject even for them. “That’s because even—or perhaps particularly—in the view of its most ardent supporters,” she writes, “global capitalism wasn’t supposed to work quite this way.” Level playing field? No way: The playing field is landscaped so that money rolls toward those who already have it. Equal opportunity? See the preceding point. Yet, Freeland continues, the switcheroo that robbed the middle class of its gains in the transition to “the America of the 1 Percent” is so new that our ways of talking and thinking about capitalism haven’t caught up to reality, so that “when it comes to income inequality, Americans think they live in Sweden—or in the late 1950s.” Smart, talking-point-friendly and full of magazine-style human-interest anecdotes, Freeland’s account serves up other news, including the grim thought that recovery may never come for those outside the favored zone, as well as some provocative insights on how the superaffluent (don’t say rich, say affluent—it avoids making the rich feel uncomfortable) view the rest of us.
Not exactly the Communist Manifesto, but Freeland’s book ought to make news of its own as she makes the rounds—well worth reading.
Here's a bit of a piece from Freeland:
COLUMN-America's middle class goes global-Chrystia Freeland
Thu Oct 11, 2012 5:21pm EDT
President Barack Obama did a miserable job of making his own case last week. But speak to his supporters and the pitch is clear: The American middle class is being hollowed out; Obama's self-appointed mission is to try to save it.
That is what I heard from Jeffrey Liebman, one of the president's economic advisers... Liebman said the central difference between his candidate and Mitt Romney was the president's view that trickle-down economics doesn't work. Instead, he believes policy needs to focus on the middle class. Economic growth, he said, should come from the middle and radiate out...
In a separate interview, Mark Gallogly, co-founder of the private equity and credit investment firm Centerbridge Partners and one of Obama's earliest supporters on Wall Street, likewise emphasized the middle class. The president's overriding concern, Gallogly told me, was with the workers who make $24,000 a year. Their lot is a pressing issue, Gallogly argued, because even before the recession there had been persistent downward pressure on middle-class wages. Yesterday's middle-class job can land you among the working poor today.
You may be tempted to say that focusing on the middle class is about as distinctive as supporting motherhood. That is true enough. Two things stand apart in the Obama administration's analysis of the problem.
One - and this is what has really riled the billionaire set - is Obama's belief that making the world safe for American business doesn't automatically translate into a rescue of the American middle class. The second, related idea is that the globalized, high-tech economy of the 21st century poses a particular challenge to the sorts of well-paid jobs that were the backbone of the U.S. middle class in the 20th.
These are two powerful assertions. What is missing is the connection between this domestic focus on the middle-class American worker and Obama's foreign policy agenda.
At this stage in the campaign, it would probably be political malpractice to ask the president to venture into this esoteric land, appealingly dubbed "geo-economics" by its most wonkish explorers. So far only Tom Friedman of the New York Times has managed to explore this terrain and retain his popular following, and a lot of proper nouns and metaphors have been tortured in the process...
There's plenty more in there, but I think her unironic invokation of The Mustache really says it all. She does end up by calling for some sort of collective action, though?
The hollowing out of the middle class is a problem common to all Western industrialized economies. Maybe we should work together to solve it.
The problem, of course, is that people (notably Liberals) Just Don't Understand The Way Things Work Today.
Here's a bit from The Observer:
The Very Rich Are Very Different: Chrystia Freeland Introduces Us to the New Global Elite
The 0.1 percent, and how they got that way
There are no beggars, no factory workers, no coal miners, hospital nurses, outsourced office hands or middle school teachers who figure prominently in Plutocrats (Penguin Press, 336 pages, $27.95), Chrystia Freeland’s new book on rising income disparity. (Call-center workers at startup whiz Tony Hsieh’s Zappos do make a cameo.) That’s by design. It’s Ms. Freeland’s stated intent to examine the widening gap between the mega-rich and the rest of us through the lives and careers of the men—yes, men—at the top. (The book’s full, ominous title is Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else.) That means, as her discussion of the distaste affluent Americans have for the word “rich” suggests, a study of the plutocrats on their own terms, and not, say, according to the 99/1 rhetoric posited by Occupy Wall Street.
And so the book is populated by financial, technological and emerging-market entrepreneurs peering down from their mountaintops, as well as the closest cousins of the fortunate few: the elite artists, artisans and thinkers who cater to, study or simply swim in the slipstream of the extremely rich.
The operative word is extremely...
It sounds titillating, but it isn’t. That’s also by design. Plutocrats isn’t a book about the lifestyles of the fabulously wealthy, but rather the global trends the book’s titular class surfed to success. Ms. Freeland isn’t interested here in the “original sins” that allowed men like Mr. Vekselberg to seize control of the Russian economy in the days of privatization (she told some of those stories in a previous book, Sale of the Century) but in locating the plutocrats’ winning instincts in economic, political and cultural contexts.
The result is something resembling a cocktail party at Davos or the Aspen Institute Ideas Festival or any of the other stops on the circuit of the mega-rich. The guests are long on intelligence, determination and self-confidence. The affect, as anyone who’s ever watched a TED Talk might surmise, is empirical and dry.
Plutocrats grew out of an article Ms. Freeland published in The Atlantic in January 2011, which postulated the rise of a new global elite and rested on two ideas that at the time I found thrilling...Plutocrats doesn’t deliver any such strikes of lightning, but it’s rife with impressive analysis...The phenomena she describes are often self-apparent...These are not surprising concepts, but the thoroughness with which Ms. Freeland surrounds the ideas is satisfying...
Midway through Plutocrats, many readers will light upon an unpleasant notion: That, to invoke F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous formulation on a far greater scale, we are not like the doers at the helm of the new world order. Ms. Freeland describes her own archetype in thinking about billionaires-by-disruption: public-school-educated students who go on to attend elite universities, thus equipped with the brains and the outsider status that come in handy if you’re looking to change the world. (It helps explain Ms. Freeland’s comfort with these people to know that she was born in Alberta, Canada, and matriculated to Harvard.) Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the richest man in Russia until he bucked the government too hard and wound up imprisoned for tax evasion, draws a sharper distinction: “If a man is not an oligarch, something is not right with him.”
...Along with the realization that we are not like them comes another idea, which is that Ms. Freeland is going rather easy on the new masters of the universe. Indeed, when it comes time for her to make a prescription for right behavior, she draws it from the remote location of 14th century Venice...
That Atlantic article is here, and I think it had me eye-rolling the first time I read it, too. So did this excerpt from the book. And here's another review (at huffpo of all places:
Uber-Rich Porn
Back in the quaint times of the previous economic age--the era before private jets and Manhattan socialites struggling to subsist on mere tens of millions of dollars a year--rich people generally understood that they were rich primarily by dint of lucky happenstance. Most had been born into well-endowed families, ensuring their lasting material comfort, and they tended to accept an accompanying social responsibility: They were expected to share some of the spoils with the less fortunate via public works. Those who did not abide risked the wrath of the populist mob or the tax collector.
This loose social compact endured more or less as the industrial revolution delivered a Gilded Age. It lasted into the 20th century, as the masters of industry grasped that their new mass-produced wares--from automobiles to kitchen appliances--needed no less than a mass market, and that required a prospering middle class.
But this traditional accommodation between the economic classes is today all but inoperative. An emerging global elite is increasingly intent on amassing more than ever while writing the rules to ensure they hang on to as much as they can. This is the fundamental takeaway from Chrystia Freeland's important new book, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else.
Freeland, global editor-at-large for Reuters, argues that the old order in which the rewards of capitalism were distributed progressively through taxation and lasting public works has been supplanted by a winner-takes-all marketplace, one that has driven economic inequality to alarming extremes. The ultimate haves -- not merely the 1 percent, but the .1 percent -- have grown so powerful that they threaten to capture the organs of government, wielding authority in pursuit of their own financial interests, at the expense of opportunities for us non-billionaires.
Much of the story behind this concentration of wealth is familiar...
But the key insight in Freeland's book -- an expansion of a widely read magazine article she penned last year in The Atlantic -- is how these forces of change have become so potent that they have managed to sow angst even under the roofs of mere multi-millionaires cognizant that billionaires now rule.
Faced with new opportunity twinned with widening inequality, nearly everyone worries about their hold on their station...In Freeland's telling, one crucial factor distinguishes today's uber-rich from their forebears: They carry a striking sense of entitlement, seeing themselves as people who have constructed their own fortunes, as opposed to aristocrats who inherited their affluence....
Freeland seems a tad infatuated with these supposedly swashbuckling capitalists. She celebrates the Russian and Chinese oligarchs whose commercial empires were hived off from the old Communist state sector in a process that looked more like looting than free enterprise.... "Even today's rent-seeking plutocrats work for a living," she writes. "Carlos Slim or the Russian oligarchs owe their fortunes to rents they captured themselves, not to estates conquered by distant ancestors." She adds: "The bulk of their wealth is generally the fruit of hustle, intelligence, and a lot of luck. They are not aristocrats, by and large, but rather economic meritocrats, preoccupied not only with consuming wealth but also with creating it."
Freeland is a bit too inclined to accept at face value the assertions of the fabulously rich, apparently confident in her ability to sort out speech served up in the service of commercial interest from genuine sentiment...
But if Freeland's charitable inclinations toward the super-wealthy are the price of admission to the ball, she does indeed bring back some decent snapshots, giving us what feels like an intimate glimpse into the daily calculations of people whose annual incomes reach ten digits.
Here we get a glimpse at the home economics of Manhattan's Upper East Side:
"A lot of people under forty years old are making, like, $20 million or $30 million a year in these hedge funds, and they don't know what to do with it,"...if you're going to buy all this stuff, life starts getting really expensive... and if you're going to have four houses, and you're going to run the four houses, it's like you start spending some money." When a guest mentions that $20 million a year ends up nearly halved by taxes, everyone at the table nods in agreement.
Freeland's book is full of this sort of uber-rich porn: hedge funders complaining about how hard they work, how much they fly, how they never see their children.
Yet despite the promise of the book's subtitle, she devotes scant ink to assessing the prospects for "everyone else," leaving us wondering how we might earn our way as more of the wealth slides toward people who already have so much.
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