• Complain

Freeland - Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

Here you can read online Freeland - Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2012, publisher: Penguin Press HC, The, genre: Politics. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Freeland Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
  • Book:
    Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Penguin Press HC, The
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2012
  • Rating:
    4 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 80
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

A groundbreaking examination of wealth disparity, income inequality, and the new global elite

There has always been some gap between rich and poor in this country, but in the last few decades what it means to be rich has changed dramatically. Alarmingly, the greatest income gap is not between the 1 percent and the 99 percent, but within the wealthiest 1 percent of our nation--as the merely wealthy are left behind by the rapidly expanding fortunes of the new global super-rich. Forget the 1 percent; Plutocrats proves that it is the wealthiest 0.1 percent who are outpacing the rest of us at break-neck speed.

Whats changed is more than numbers. Today, most colossal fortunes are new, not inherited--amassed by perceptive businessmen who see themselves as deserving victors in a cut-throat international competition. As a transglobal class of successful professionals, todays self-made oligarchs often feel they have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home. Bringing together the economics and psychology of these new super-rich, Plutocrats puts us inside a league very much of its own, with its own rules.

The closest mirror to our own time is the late nineteenth century Gilded Age--the era of powerful robber barons like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Then as now, emerging markets and innovative technologies collided to produce unprecedented wealth for more people than ever in human history. Yet those at the very top benefited far more than others--and from this pinnacle they exercised immense and unchecked power in their countries. Todays closest analogue to these robber barons can be found in the turbulent economies of India, Brazil, and China, all home to ferocious market competition and political turmoil. But wealth, corruption, and populism are no longer constrained by national borders, so this new Gilded Age is already transforming the economics of the West as well. Plutocrats demonstrates how social upheavals generated by the first Gilded Age may pale in comparison to what is in store for us, as the wealth of the entire globalized world is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

Cracking open the tight-knit world of the new global super-rich is Chrystia Freeland, an acclaimed business journalist who has spent nearly two decades reporting on the new transglobal elite. She parses an internal Citigroup memo that urges clients to design portfolios around the international Plutonomy and not the national rest; follows Russian, Mexican, and Indian oligarchs during the privatization boom as they manipulate the levers of power to commandeer their local economies; breaks down the gender divide between the vast female-managed middle class and the worlds one thousand billionaires; shows how, by controlling both the economic and political institutions of their nation, the richest members of Chinas National Peoples Congress have amassed more wealth than every branch of American government combined--the president, his cabinet, the justices of the Supreme Court, and both houses of Congress.

Though the results can be shocking, Freeland dissects the lives of the worlds wealthiest individuals with empathy, intelligence, and deep insight. Brightly written, powerfully researched, and propelled by fascinating original interviews with the plutocrats themselves, Plutocrats is a tour-de-force of social and economic history, and the definitive examination of inequality in our time.

Review

Rising inequality is one of the most pressing issues of our time. Chrystia Freelands Plutocrats provides us with a glimpse of the lives of Americas 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; University Professor, Columbia University

Mix crisp economics, ripe history, and two pinches of salty gossip, and you have the flavor of Chrystia Freelands entertaining book. From the opulent Bradley Martin ball of 1897 to its modern echoes in Sun Valley and Davos, Plutocrats chronicles the habits of the workaholic overclassits 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 richesand 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, Freelands 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, co-author of Why Nations Fail; economics professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The worlds 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 U.S. Treasury Secretary; Charles W. Eliot , University Professor, Harvard University

Chrystia Freeland has written a fascinating account of perhaps the most important economic and political development of our era: the rise of a new plutocracy. She explains that todays wealthy are different from their predecessors: more skilled and more global; and more often employees than owners, notably so in finance and high technology. By putting together stories of individuals with reading of the scholarly evidence, she gives us a clear view of what many will view as a not so brave new world.
--Martin Wolf, Chief Economics Commentator for the*Financial Times
*

About the Author

CHRYSTIAFREELAND is the Editor of Thomson Reuters Digital, following years of service at the Financial Times both in New York and London. She was the deputy editor of Canadas The Globe and Mail and has reported for the Financial Times, The Economist, and The Washington Post. Freelands last book was Sale of a Century: The Inside Story of the Second Russian Revolution. She lives in New York City.

blogs.reuters.com/chrystia-freeland

twitter.com/#!/cafreeland

Freeland: author's other books


Who wrote Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

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 - photo 1

Chrystia Freeland

THE PENGUIN PRESS

NEW YORK

2012

THE PENGUIN PRESS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books, Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa Penguin China, B7 Jaiming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in 2012 by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright Chrystia Freeland, 2012

All rights 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 index.

ISBN 978-1-101-59594-7

1. Rich peopleConduct of life. 2. Poor. I. Title.

HB251.F74 2012

305.5'234dc23

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

In memory of my mother Halyna Chomiak Freeland CONTENTS INTRODUCTION - photo 2

In memory of my mother,
Halyna Chomiak Freeland

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION The poor enjoy what the rich could not before afford What - photo 3

INTRODUCTION

The poor enjoy what the rich could not before afford What were the luxuries - photo 4

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

B ranko 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 subjectwhich meant one the ruling regime didnt want its scholars to look at too closely. That wasnt 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 tanks 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 isnt that the super-elite are reluctant to display their wealththat 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 Americas 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 couldnt avoid singling out the countrys top earners, he should call them affluent. Naming them as rich, he told me, sounded divisivesomething the rich dont 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 didnt 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. Ive been in rooms and seen people stand up and say, Im Bob Kenny and Im rich. And then they burst into tears.

It is not just the super-rich who dont like to talk about rising income inequality. It can be an ideologically uncomfortable conversation for many of the rest of us, too. Thats because evenor perhaps particularlyin the view of its most ardent supporters, global capitalism wasnt 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 eraoverall wealth and productivity were fairly small, so there wasnt that much for an elite to capturethen 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 economicsthe 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 Kuznetss 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, knowledgethe power of the few, the poverty, ignorance, and weakness of the rest.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else»

Look at similar books to Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else»

Discussion, reviews of the book Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.