plutocrats

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

by Chrystia Freeland  · 11 Oct 2012  · 481pp  · 120,693 words

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

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matter, too. 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 chiefly to favorable government decisions—have also been enriched partly by this growing global economic pie. America still dominates

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not only missed these windfalls—many have found their professions, companies, and life savings destroyed by the same forces that have enriched and empowered the plutocrats. Both globalization and technology have led to the rapid obsolescence of many jobs in the West; they’ve put Western workers in direct competition with

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outfits in New York, rather than in Paris, thus stimulating the local economy. The city’s musicians’ union agreed, arguing that spending by the plutocrats was an important source of employment for everyone else. But public opinion more generally was unconvinced. The opprobrium—and, on the crest of the wider

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Depression, an economic downturn in the United States and Europe that endured longer than the Great Depression two generations later. The industrial revolution created the plutocrats—we called them the robber barons—and the gap between them and everyone else. The architects of the industrial revolution understood this division of society

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those who furnish them. Can any condition of society be more desirable than this?” Jefferson contrasted this egalitarian Arcadia with an England of paupers and plutocrats: “Now, let us compute by numbers the sum of happiness of the two countries. In England, happiness is the lot of the aristocracy only;

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percent of that age successfully demanded. A couple of decades later, the Great Depression further 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

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Soviet bloc, where living standards lagged behind those in the West. But in the United States and in western Europe, the compromise between the plutocrats and everyone else worked. Economic growth soared and income inequality steadily declined. Between the 1940s and 1970s in the United States the gap between the

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challenge to capitalism, leaving the market economy as the only system anyone has come up with that works. That red threat was one reason the plutocrats accepted the Treaty of Detroit, and its even more generous European equivalents. The red surrender emboldened the advocates of the Washington Consensus and helped

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you own a company in Dallas or Düsseldorf, the urbanizing peasants of the emerging markets probably work for you. That is good news for the plutocrats in the West, who can reap the benefits of simultaneously being nineteenth-century robber barons and twenty-first-century technology tycoons. But it makes

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admit that had he been able to foresee the consequences of his $3 million birthday extravaganza, he would have reconsidered. TWO CULTURE OF THE PLUTOCRATS Somebody ought to sit down and think about this, because your corporate types are soon going to be a stateless superclass, people who live for

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schools, especially the fancy English ones, where Russian oligarchs landing their helicopters on the sports fields for parent visiting day has become commonplace. China’s plutocrats, who devote more than a fifth of their annual spending to their children’s education, are enthusiastic globalizers. According to Rupert Hoogewerf, publisher of the

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country, the plutonomy is not uniform: its tribes have distinct national customs and its individual members make their own choices about how to live. The plutocrats whose native countries are repressive or volatile, like the Russians or the Middle Easterners, tend to be the most thoroughly global. Some, like the

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.” But while capital—and capitalists—have gone global, governments and most of their middle-class citizens operate within national boundaries. Figuring out how the plutocrats are connected to the rest of us is one of the challenges of the rise of the global super-elite. Harry Mount, the Spectator essayist

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magazine. The best known of these events is the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, invitation to which marks an aspiring plutocrat’s arrival on the international scene—and where, in lieu of noble titles, an elaborate hierarchy of conference badges has such significance that one first

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Old Masters, the dinner table conversation would not be out of place in a graduate seminar. Mrs. Kravis takes pride in bringing together not only plutocrats such as her husband and Michael Bloomberg, but also thinkers and policy makers such as Richard Holbrooke, Robert Zoellick, and Financial Times columnist Martin

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libraries, and universities; Alfred Nobel ensured that he would be remembered for something other than the invention of dynamite. What is notable about today’s plutocrats is that they tend to bestow their fortunes in much the same way they made them: entrepreneurially. Rather than merely donate to worthy charities or

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a previous generation, for whom poor neighbors belonged to a very different category from the poor of the third world. But to the globe-trotting plutocrat, there isn’t much difference between the poor child in the London estate (Britspeak for housing projects) and the New Delhi slum. PHILANTHRO-CAPITALISM

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Mitt Romney, to emerging market billionaires whose wealth emboldens them to challenge authoritarian rulers, like Russia’s Mikhail Khodorkovsky or Egypt’s Naguib Sawiris. The plutocratic politician can use his own money to bankroll his campaign directly, and also to build a network of civic support through the less explicitly political

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donations of his personal foundation. Some farsighted plutocrats try to use their money not merely to buy public office for themselves but to redirect the reigning ideology of a nation, a region,

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has had a powerful impact on electoral politics and the legislative agenda in the United States and beyond. Your own view of these explicitly political plutocratic ventures depends on your own politics. If you support drug legalization, you are probably a fan of the Soros millions dedicated to that cause.

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when the philanthro-capitalists use their money to finance a political agenda that dovetails with their personal business interests or with the interests of the plutocratic class as a whole. The Koch brothers, for instance, have pushed for less government regulation of industry, including state efforts to protect the environment.

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include oil refineries, oil pipelines, and lumber mills—all businesses that would benefit from a weakened EPA. Then there are the class interests of the plutocrats more generally. Balancing the budget isn’t an idea that belongs to a particular socioeconomic group or political party—the Germans, with their generous social

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of how the emergence of the global plutocracy is creating a class of superstar artists and professionals, the best and luckiest of whom can become plutocrats in their own right. Another pair of winners is Candy and Candy, the London-based brothers whose opulent interior design business expanded into property development

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They had so much discretionary income at the time, and they needed a house, so boom, right?” If you understand the economic cycles of the plutocrats, Schmidt explained, you can become pretty rich yourself: “There’s another IPO cycle going to happen off companies like Facebook. And those companies are predominantly

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can be superstars. That’s the only way to describe Bernard Touati, the Moroccan-born French dentist who has parlayed fixing the teeth of the plutocrats, starting with the Russian oligarchs, into a superstar career of his own. Roman Abramovich, the Siberian oil oligarch, paid Touati to fly regularly to

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art curator. That’s how, from the inside, the plutonomy becomes a cozy global village. SHERWIN ROSEN IS VINDICATED, TOO Providing superstar services to the plutocrats is one way to join them. But an even more powerful driver of twenty-first-century superstar economics is the way that globalization and technology

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own great wealth.” That quest starts earlier and earlier. Jones and Doriot were both nearly fifty when they started their businesses. Nowadays, would-be plutocrats want to be well on their way to their fortune by their thirtieth birthday. THE BILLIONAIRE’S CIRCLE But the real mass revolution sparked by

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and retirement savings. For the winners, revolutions can bring a windfall; for the losers, disaster. — By any measure, private equity tycoon David Rubenstein is a plutocrat. Forbes estimated his personal fortune in 2012 to be $2.8 billion. Carlyle, the private equity group he cofounded, manages $150 billion. The atrium of

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scientists who rated Slim’s success at getting telecom judgments that helped Telmex did a broader calculation of the legal effectiveness of the country’s plutocrats. They found that billionaires were three times more likely than other plaintiffs to win rulings in their favor and triumphed over state regulators an average

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first question Chinese journalists always asked me was “How were the Russian market reforms a failure compared to the Chinese approach?”—but many of their plutocrats have been the beneficiaries of a slower and more opaque version of the same transition from total state ownership to some private property. Tellingly,

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’s rent-seekers prospered through privileged access to the two essential economic goods the state does control: land and capital. A preponderance of China’s plutocrats, including Wu Yajun, the country’s wealthiest woman—and, of course, one of the delegates to the 2012 National People’s Congress—have made

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at CICC, the Chinese investment bank, which counts the illustrious private equity firms KKR and TPG among its shareholders. In rent-seeking societies, the plutocrats are appointed by the state. Who better to appoint than your own children? Another sign of the political nature of wealth in China is Beijing

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job of making the world safe for Wall Street.” — One telltale sign the state is deciding who gets rich is how much time and money plutocrats spend on selecting their government and influencing its decisions. As before, the answer is hardly contrarian. But when IMF economists Deniz Igan, Prachi Mishra,

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by emerging markets oligarchs, particularly Russians. Between 2008 and 2011 the second-largest shareholder in the New York Times was Carlos Slim. Even rent-seeking plutocrats who’ve made their fortunes the old-fashioned way—by being authoritarian despots—have been cheerfully courted by the global plutocracy. That was the case

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who had bought three condos as investment properties at the height of the bubble. It is this not-our-fault mentality that accounts for the plutocrats’ profound sense of victimization in the Obama era. You might expect that American elites—and particularly those in the financial sector—would be feeling pretty

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inability of some people to defend their position has become so manifest that it’s actually added to the power of Occupy Wall Street.” Some plutocrats are worried about the eventual political consequences of the intellectual divide between their class and everyone else. Mohamed El-Erian, the Pimco CEO, is

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deteriorating neighborhood. The well-being of the house cannot be divorced from that of the neighborhood as a whole.” El-Erian worried that his fellow plutocrats weren’t paying enough attention to the foreclosures down the block, though: “Some elites live astonishingly sheltered lives.” THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD Mark Carney

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the national average. American legislators are getting richer: their net worth increased 15 percent between 2004 and 2010. At least ten lawmakers are full-fledged plutocrats, with fortunes of more than $100 million. One academic study has suggested that serving in Washington helps these leaders get rich. Professor Alan Ziobrowski of

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. One thing that isn’t in dispute is the material value of a political career after leaving elected office. Politicians can’t fully monetize their plutocratic networks until they retire. When they do, they can become multimillionaires. Between 2000 and 2007 the Clintons earned $111 million, nearly half of it

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in Bill’s speaking fees, many of them paid by global plutocrats like Pinchuk. Tom Daschle, the former Democratic Senate majority leader, spent four years on the payroll of private equity investor Leo Hindery, earning more

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a mass market—as Henry Ford put it, he needed workers, including his own, to make enough money to buy his cars. For the plutocrats, globalization may be reducing both this political incentive and this economic one to support inclusion. That’s because in today’s interconnected economy, Western democracies

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and American Ivy League universities. — There’s another way that globalization and its twin economic force, the technology revolution, are reducing the pressure on the plutocrats to make their societies more inclusive, or to keep them that way. That is what you might call the cultural Serrata, which is already separating

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the economic system that created today’s super-elite. Elites don’t sabotage the system that created them on purpose. But even smart, farsighted plutocrats can be betrayed by their own short-term self-interest into undermining the foundations of their own society’s prosperity. In 1343, La Serenissima petitioned

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Beattie, Mark Carney, Diana Carney, Paul Martin, Dominic Barton, Mark Wiseman, David Thomson, John Stackhouse, Anne McLellan, Annalise Acorn, Don Tapscott, and Morris Rosenberg. Many plutocrats have helped me to understand their world and some have become friends (though that does not mean we always agree). They include: George Soros, Eric

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Saez, “Striking It Richer.” “Probably if you had looked at the situation” CF interview with Emmanuel Saez, February 24, 2011. CHAPTER 2: CULTURE OF THE PLUTOCRATS “Somebody ought to sit down” Scott Turow, Pleading Guilty (Grand Central Publishing, 1994), p. 174. “men like Henry George” Albert Einstein, letter to Anna

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Lindsay Rafayko of Empower Public Relations. “We may need an escape plan” Yardeni Research Daily E-mail Briefing, December 8, 2011. a few modern-day plutocrats are actually trying to build Jonathan Miles, “The Billionaire King of Techtopia,” Details, September 2011. “I have yet to talk to anybody who doesn’

Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

by Jacob Silverman  · 9 Oct 2025  · 312pp  · 103,645 words

his insider’s view, astutely described the malign forces at work—financial, political, and personal. “Musk is a poster child for divisive racist, sexist, and plutocratic tendencies that undermine democracy’s commitment to equality for all,” wrote Perez, describing the mogul as throwing a perpetual tantrum. “Musk’s willingness to burn

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for the Republican nomination, owed whatever flicker of notoriety he received to his nine-figure fortune as a software mogul and the support of other plutocrats like Oberndorf. In a supposedly ultra-blue political climate, it was these self-proclaimed moderates of the top 0.1 percent who were trying to

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over by business-friendly Republican politicians like Governor Ron DeSantis and Mayor Francis Suarez, Miami offered elites an almost ideal blend of social liberalism and plutocratic governance. It was LA without Hollywood or income tax. Or capital gains tax. Or wealth tax. Or estate tax. It was a good deal, especially

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/opinion/elon-musk-spacex-brownsville-texas.html 19 https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat 20 Author interview with Gil Duran. 21 https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat 22 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHlcAx-I0oY chapter 11: the great solano county land grab

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine

by Peter Lunenfeld  · 31 Mar 2011  · 239pp  · 56,531 words

, established these foundational memes in the early years after World War II. They were followed by the Plutocrats, who turned computing into a business during the 1950s and 1960s. In opposition to the profit-minded Plutocrats, the 1960s and 1970s brought us the Aquarians, who proposed the visual, personalized, networked computers. In

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now time to do that for our technological environments as well. We can and must leave a better legacy than this.47 139 GENERATIONS PATRIARCHS PLUTOCRATS AQUARIANS HUSTLERS HOSTS SEARCHERS 140 HOW THE COMPUTER BECAME OUR CULTURE MACHINE GENERATIONS 141 GENERATIONS HOW THE COMPUTER BECAME OUR CULTURE MACHINE X notes: pp

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. Licklider—who establish the founding memes in the early years after World War II through the early 1960s. They are followed in turn by the Plutocrats— Thomas Watson Sr. and Thomas Watson Jr. of IBM—who make a business out of computing, centralizing the operations into top-down bureaucracies during the

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1950s and 1960s. In reaction to the buttoned-down, all-business attitudes of the Plutocrats, the Aquarians of the 1960s and 1970s—people like Douglas Englebart and Alan Kay—expand on the more openended ideas of the Patriarchs, and develop

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of communication and symbiotic relationships with other media. We will return to these themes with the Aquarians, but before that, there are the Plutocrats to contend with. The Plutocrats: Two Men Named Thomas J. Watson Think. —Thomas J. Watson Sr. Our future is unlimited. —Thomas J. Watson Jr. There are few companies

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also helped to lock in IBM’s consumer base as the company moved itself and its customers from the mechanical to the electronic era. The Plutocrats, whose generation made a business out of computing, often faced hard choices between the 154 HOW THE COMPUTER BECAME OUR CULTURE MACHINE technological innovations that

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machines. Most people experienced computers through intermediaries, and the software was often entirely opaque to everyone except the programmers and input operators. 155 GENERATIONS Other Plutocrats include Gordon Moore, one of the cofounders of the dominant chip maker, Intel. His insistence that computerprocessing power would double and the price would half

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still be feasible next year when the power goes up and the price comes down. Moore was to establish another of the memes that the Plutocrats contributed to the culture of computing: the spin-off. Moore and Philip Noyce, another of the Intel cofounders, were both members of the famous “Traitorous

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off again to found Intel, which has inspired literally tens of thousands of entrepreneurs with dreams of establishing their own computer companies and becoming the Plutocrats of their generation—a variation of the participation meme. Even though IBM scientists won multiple Nobel Prizes and Turing Awards in the heyday of Big

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look to the Watsons is that they took the dreams of the Patriarchs and turned them into marketable products. What marked the era of the Plutocrats was a stolid reliability, the quarterly projections of the sales manager rather than the vision of the inventor. Their contribution to the meme of simulation

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willingness to gamble on complete discontinuities marks them as the models (whether acknowledged or not) for the Hustlers who would follow in their wake. The Plutocrats were not homogeneous by any means. They included authentic engineering geniuses like Moore, 156 HOW THE COMPUTER BECAME OUR CULTURE MACHINE hard-charging entrepreneurs like

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. —Douglas Engelbart It’s not the technology that lives. It’s the dream that lives. —Alan Kay Doug Engelbart worked in the world that the Plutocrats ruled, but made the world in which we live. He drew inspiration from the visions of the Patriarchs, and they funded his campaign against the

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culture of the Plutocrats. As an army radio operator in the Philippines just after World War II, Engelbart read Bush’s seminal article, “As We May Think,” and its

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positions in California. Engelbart devoted his life to developing a new way to think about computers—not data processing machines 157 GENERATIONS as per the Plutocrats, but instead augmenters of the human intellect.14 He did his major work of this period at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), near Stanford University

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strove to humanize, decentralize, and personalize computers, and were opposed to virtually every aspect of the way that the Plutocrats had commodified and corporatized computing. What the Aquarians felt was missing in the Plutocratic era was the sense that humans had invented a new ally, not just for the battlefield, lab, or

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both rich and powerful was their ability to meld the attributes of the two generations that preceded them—fusing the hardheaded business logic of the Plutocrats with the visionary futurity of the Aquarians. 163 GENERATIONS Jobs and Gates have an interesting competitive history, leapfrogging each other in the quest to achieve

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be the big winner. Within a decade Microsoft was worth more than IBM, and Gates was the richest person in the world. Gates defeated the Plutocrats at their own game and ascended into their ranks. Even adjusted for inflation, the Watsons were never as rich as Gates became. Gates has been

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admired for his strategy and condemned for his ruthlessness, but much like the Plutocrats before him, he was never defined by vision. Steve Jobs, the cofounder and CEO of Apple, on the other hand, has been known to create

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were able to do, regardless of who did what first and with what motives, was to apply the marketing savvy and managerial brilliance of the Plutocrats to disseminate to a huge, worldwide population the innovative spirit and inventive genius of the Aquarians. Over the next three decades, by hook or by

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an intentional, but not necessarily direct, description.”24 To understand why Torvalds is so important to the meme of participation, we have to revisit the Plutocrats. In the first twenty years or so of computing after World War II, when institutions bought mainframes from vendors like IBM and DEC, the software

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, 143–147, 151, 156–165, 170, 175–178 Patriarchs and, xv, 143–144, 147–153, 156–157, 162–163, 166–168 personal, 152, 161–167 Plutocrats and, xv, 144, 152–159, 163–166, 170 production and, xiii relationship with data and, 32 Searchers and, xv–xvi, 144, 167, 174–178 simulation

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participation and, 15–17, 143–147, 151, 156–165, 170, 175–178 Patriarchs and, xv, 143–144, 147–153, 156–157, 162–163, 166–168 Plutocrats and, xv, 144, 152–159, 163–166, 170 postmodernism and, 39–40 Searchers and, xv–xvi, 144, 167, 174–178 simulation and, 15–17, 143

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and, 15, 23, 33–34, 57, 67, 72, 188n25 Web n.0 and, 85, 88 Play space, 74–77 Plug-in Drug, The (Winn), xii Plutocrats culture machine and, 144, 152–159, 163–166, 170 description of term, xv Hewlett and, 145, 157 Moore and, 156 Noyce and, 156 Packard and

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and, xvi, 13, 15, 32–34, 39, 53, 55, 62, 64, 67–77, 85, 88, 110–111, 130–131, 143, 153, 160–163, 185n22, 188n25 Plutocrats and, xv, 144, 152–159, 163–166, 170 plutopian meliorism and, xvi, 127–129, 133, 137–138 power and, xvi, 8, 13, 17, 22 (see

Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better

by Rob Reich  · 20 Nov 2018  · 257pp  · 75,685 words

reason is that philanthropy is a form or exercise of power. In the case of wealthy donors or private foundations especially, it can be a plutocratic exercise of power, the deployment of vast private assets toward a public purpose, frequently with the goal of changing public policy. In the United States

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, for instance), consumption, or an exercise of power, sometimes an objectionable exercise of power; when undertaken by the wealthy, it can be the expression of plutocratic voice in a democratic society. In many respects, this latter idea is an old and familiar line of criticism. Left-wing critics, especially those of

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the early twentieth century needed to be authorized by a democratic body in order to be incorporated reflects the tension that was seen between the plutocratic voice of a private foundation and a democratic society that prizes the political equality of citizens. Extending the framework in the preceding chapter, I examine

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favor the rich in providing them larger benefits. The choice of the charitable contributions deduction as the preferred tax policy for philanthropy introduces a potent plutocratic bias. It’s of course true that wealthy people give away more money in absolute terms than do poor people. But why should public policy

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States for funding a wave of controversial efforts to reform poorly performing public schools.³⁶ In chapter 4 I take up questions about the influence of plutocratic philanthropic voices in public policy and the operation of public institutions such as local schools. Here, I want to examine the more unheralded but no

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all deductions for charitable contributions; those making $60,000 and above claim more than 98 percent of all such deductions.²⁷ The result is a decidedly plutocratic bias in the subsidy, where the favored beneficiaries of the wealthy receive the lion’s share of the subsidy. The

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plutocratic bias is troubling, for systematic overattention in the policy tool itself to the interests and preferences of the wealthy against those of the middle-class

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to produce goods that no one can be prevented from enjoying and that no person’s consumption reduces the amount available to others, then the plutocratic bias nevertheless redounds to the advantage of all citizens. But the vast majority of public charities do not produce pure public goods. Hospitals and universities

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the generally elite clientele of private hospitals, selective universities, and most cultural organizations. Leaving aside the strict conditions of pure public goods, the concern about plutocratic bias might be mitigated if the favored beneficiaries of philanthropic donors, and of the wealthy especially, were charities engaged in social welfare or services for

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the poor. That is, plutocratic bias might be tolerable when charity provides for the basic needs of all citizens and thereby realizes an important aim of distributive justice. At the

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or eleemosynary in aim. These problems once again target the mechanism in the United States and elsewhere to deliver the subsidy: the tax deduction. The plutocratic bias in the subsidy and the lack of redistribution could be altered by both changing the mechanism of the subsidy (change to a capped tax

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undermines and makes a mockery of it. As described earlier, a tax deduction for charitable contributions, when there is a progressive income tax, establishes a plutocratic element in the public policy. The deduction supplies a greater subsidy to the wealthy, who are, of course, already likely to possess a more powerful

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entirely (because they do not itemize their deductions) and wealthier citizens claim far more of the subsidized benefit than others. The consequence is a troubling plutocratic bias in the contours of civil society, systematically more organizations favored by the rich and fewer favored by the poor. We get not egalitarian citizen

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voice in civil society but plutocratic citizen voice, underwritten and promoted by tax policy.³⁶ Here, then, in the pluralism rationale is where an egalitarian norm can and should inform the legal

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renders it an institutional oddity in democracy. Private foundations are, more or less by definition, the legal sanctioning, or more precisely the legal promotion, of plutocratic voices in democratic societies. Democratic societies involve a commitment to much more than a representative system of government with free and fair elections. Democracy involves

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, following the ideas of John Stuart Mill in chapter 1, foundations, when accompanied by the right policy structure, can serve as a mechanism for domesticating plutocrats to serve rather than subvert democratic aims. The Birth of the Private Foundation in the United States In the early 1900s, John D. Rockefeller wished

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created a legal template for the institutional design of foundations with limits on size and time and provisions for clear public oversight. The balance between plutocratic voice and democratic voice in the operation of American foundations would have been struck much differently. And of course the Rockefeller Foundation would have closed

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nearly always render philanthropy praiseworthy. Instead, we should view philanthropy, especially big philanthropy in the form of private foundations, as an exercise of power and plutocratic voice that warrants democratic scrutiny. The larger the foundation, the greater the potential power. Think here of Bill Gates, whose philanthropy permits him to stride

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they operate are optimal and publicly justifiable. Perhaps foundations could play important roles in democratic societies, despite being an exercise of power and expression of plutocratic voice, if they were subject to different legal arrangements. Therefore, asking about the purpose of a foundation in a democracy is not an impertinent but

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twentieth-century philanthropic insider, “there is no more strange or improbable creature than the private foundation.”⁹ Why are foundations institutional oddities? Foundations represent, by definition, plutocratic voices in a democratic society committed, in principle, to the equality of citizens. But the strangeness of the foundation form goes far beyond this. The

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extension, for giving public expression to the preferences of rich people. Private foundations are not merely plutocratic voices, an observation that would follow from the simple fact that foundations are created by the wealthy. The plutocratic voices of the wealthy are amplified, as it were, by the loss of treasury revenue that

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the foundation form suggests a strong case against. Foundations appear at odds with democracy, for they represent, by definition and by law, the expression of plutocratic voices directed toward the public good. But why, in a democracy, should the size of one’s wallet give one a greater say in the

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public good and public policy? Why should this plutocratic voice be subsidized by the public? And why should democracy allow this voice to extend across generations in the form of tax-protected assets? It

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would seem that foundations are a misplaced plutocratic, and powerful, element in a democratic society. Several further arguments lay bare the tensions between philanthropy and democracy and call into doubt several of the

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if foundations of all endowment sizes do partially decentralize the definition and provision of public goods, the resulting pluralism of philanthropic voices will have a plutocratic not fully democratic cast. The minority, experimental, or controversial public goods funded by foundations will represent the diverse preferences of the wealthy, not of the

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) have significantly more politically conservative preferences than average citizens.²⁵ Thus, the activity of foundations, even when it decentralizes the production of public goods, retains a plutocratic character. I see no way to avoid this conclusion, for while wealthy and poor people tend to give the same percentage of their incomes to

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not against foundations as such but against the tax-subsidized aspect of foundation activity. If foundations create a plutocratic pluralism, public subsidies that stimulate more such activity are harder to justify. Perhaps a plutocratic tempering of government orthodoxy is better than no tempering at all. And if this is true, then perhaps

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is an argument not that philanthropy supplants or supplements what government does but that foundations perform a distinct role. It is an argument not that plutocratic voices stand in ineliminable tension with democracy but that such voices can be directed, through policy and social norms, to serve the aim of democratic

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institutional form of a foundation. I have countered the idea that foundations are essentially repugnant to democracy. My point is that in spite of their plutocratic power, the peculiar institutional form of the foundation can have an important role in a democracy. Are foundations democratically required? I am not prepared to

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policies. There is good reason for skepticism that foundations should be welcome in liberal democratic societies, for they represent more or less paradigmatic examples of plutocratic voices in a democratic setting that prizes egalitarian relationships between citizens, especially in the political arena. The chapter’s conclusion, however, was that private foundations

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influence over political decision making is not democratic, it is harder to evaluate interventions that influence or weaken the efficacy of political decisions” (Saunders-Hastings, “Plutocratic Philanthropy” Journal of Politics 80, no. 1 (2018): 149–161. 5. The justly famous passage reads, “Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all minds

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word” (Myth of Ownership, 127). The pluralism rationale is an attempt to supply this “very different” argument. 36. For a similar argument, see Saunders-Hastings, “Plutocratic Philanthropy.” 37. See Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott, The Stakeholder Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000) and Ackerman and Ayres, Voting with Dollars

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Horvath and Walter Powell, “Contributory or Disruptive: Do New Forms of Philanthropy Erode Democracy?,” in Reich, Cordelli, and Bernholz, Philanthropy in Democratic Societies; Saunders-Hastings, “Plutocratic Philanthropy,” 149–161. See also Reckhow, Follow the Money; Tompkins-Stange, Policy Patrons. 22. A small library of books and reports have been written over

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, no. 2 (2012): 35–55. Salamon, Lester M., and Stefan Toepler. The International Guide to Nonprofit Law. New York: John Wiley, 1997. Saunders-Hastings, Emma. “Plutocratic Philanthropy.” Journal of Politics 80, no. 1 (2018): 149–161. Scanlon, Thomas. What We Owe to Each Other. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Schneewind

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of, 9, 171; democracy and (see democracy and private foundations, relationship of); distributions from, equality and, 90–92, 150–51; as exercise of power and plutocratic voice, 143; family, 43; growth in number of, 9, 141–42; intergenerational justice and (see intergenerational justice); legitimacy of, 104, 150–52, 168; local education

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–99; origin of general-purpose grant-making (private), 1–7, 136–40; payout rule, 84, 145–46, 171, 210n25; percentage of private giving from, 90; plutocratic bias of, 123–24, 132, 158; purposes of private, 140–43; small, disadvantages of, 157–58, 165; small, growth in number of, 156–57; suggestions

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: associational life as a site of, 181; foundations in a democracy, as a positive role for, 152–59; as rationale for donation incentives, 128–33 plutocratic bias, 123–24, 132, 158 Police Department, hypothetical case of, 102–3 political philosophy: questions about philanthropy from the perspective of, 12–13; reasoning in

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

by Anand Giridharadas  · 27 Aug 2018  · 296pp  · 98,018 words

the social sector that they should guide its pursuit of greater equality by assuming board seats and leadership positions. Conferences and idea festivals sponsored by plutocrats and big business host panels on injustice and promote “thought leaders” who are willing to confine their thinking to improving lives within the faulty system

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, against all evidence, that his interests have nothing to do with the change he seeks. He became the chief salesman for the theory, rife among plutocratic change agents, that what is best for powerful him is best for the powerless, too. Trump is the reductio ad absurdum of a culture that

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American president who launched his career with a belief in changing the world through political action, and then, as he began to spend time with plutocrats in his post-presidential life, gravitated toward private methods of change that benefit rather than scare them. You will meet a widely lionized “social innovator

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bears a duty “to point out when an emperor has no clothes.” The ascendant type is the thought leader, who is more congenial to the plutocrats who sponsor so much intellectual production today. Thought leaders tend, Drezner says, to “know one big thing and believe that their important idea will change

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without realizing it, after “a slow accretion of opportunities that are hard to refuse.” It could be added to Drezner’s analysis that even as plutocrats were providing these alluring incentives, less corrupting sources of intellectual patronage were dwindling. On America’s campuses in recent decades, the fraction of academics on

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take Friedman and Gladwell at their word about the effect of money on them as individuals, it is hard to accept the conclusion that the plutocratic funding of ideas has no effect on the marketplace of ideas as a whole. The money can liberate the top thought leaders from the institutions

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and high-net-worth individuals. While individual thought leaders like Gladwell might resist the temptations of changing their ideas for, say, a banking convention, the plutocrats’ money amounts to a kind of subsidy for ideas they are willing to hear. And subsidies have consequences, as the Harvard Business School professor Gautam

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believed in his own ideas, he made a point of criticizing thought-leader charlatans whom he fretted were being birthed by a new age of plutocratically backed ideas and the commodification of thought. “I have contempt for people in the speaking circuit,” he said, even though he was one of the

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them into the stratosphere of fame and public recognition. “To stay in the superstar rank, intellectuals need to be able to speak fluently to the plutocratic class,” Drezner writes, adding, “If they want to make potential benefactors happy, they cannot necessarily afford to speak truth to money.” It isn’t that

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a new intellectual sphere in recent decades. It turned thought leaders into our most heard philosophers. It put many on the payroll of companies and plutocrats as their means of making a living. It promoted a body of ideas friendly to the winners of the age. It beamed out so many

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philanthropy for ignoring their complicity in causing the problems they later seek to solve. Before writing the letter, Walker had been universally popular with the plutocrats, which isn’t to say that everyone disliked what he had written. Robert Rubin, late of Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and the Treasury Department, told Walker

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he loved the letter, finding it “fresh and different.” He said he had “never read anything that did that.” But many plutocrats objected to Walker’s shining the spotlight on inequality, instead of the issues they were more comfortable talking about, like poverty or opportunity. They disliked

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more uncomfortable truths in his arena, his task had changed: It was to stay in the game, to keep the powerful listening, to challenge his plutocrat friends without scaring them away. As the Lincoln surged some inches and halted and surged again, Walker pondered the pushback he got from these friends

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, or are weaker, or in fact they would push me backwards.” The delicate art of a night like this, he said, was to make the plutocrats “feel good about America” and make them “feel good about themselves,” and, having softened them with those feelings, persuade them that their America has to

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the Children’s Museum of Manhattan. She was also a co-owner of the New York Giants football team. By the standards of her fellow plutocrats, Tisch was ambivalent about her fortune. Late one morning not long ago, she sat in a banquette corner at the Regency Bar & Grill at a

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to the currents of his time, Clinton decided that if you wanted truly to change the world now, you needed the help of companies and plutocrats, and thus you needed your own conference on the MarketWorld circuit. The idea that formed was to host a conference during UN Week in New

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Rodrik, it isn’t just that solving things at the global level (which, in the absence of world government, often means privately, which often means plutocratically) lacks legitimacy. Pushing things up into that realm gives globalists “moral cover or ethical cover for escaping their domestic obligations as citizens in their own

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intolerant of other dreams. It sought to make hard choices seem inevitable and uncomplicated. It sought to blur what happened to be good for the plutocrats in the room with what was good for ordinary people. It promulgated another inspiring vision of changing the world that left the underlying systems untouched

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why recent decades have been so grueling for millions of Americans. Clinton, like Obama after him, was up against militant conservatives and libertarians, backed by plutocratic donors, who loathed the very idea of public, governmental problem-solving. To be clear, that is the movement chiefly responsible for market supremacy’s takeover

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you feed the beast?” Perhaps Clinton, like many of his fellow win-win globalists, had, on the question of how to confront the influence of plutocrats over the last generation, overfed the beast. What did he make of the criticism that the private-sector-led approach to social change undermined the

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, perhaps, than it was to deploy it in America when taking on the problem of soft drinks, juice boxes, and childhood obesity. One’s American plutocrat friends didn’t necessarily have a problem with more energetic government in Africa. But they preferred win-win solutions in their own backyard, where energetic

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leadership, charging as much as a few hundred thousand dollars a speech. Yes, he reportedly lunched before some of these speeches with smaller groups of plutocrats who paid, say, $10,000 a head to eat with him and hear his take on the world. But, Clinton argued, “When you can’t

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stranger by the fact that Trump incarnated the very problem he named. Was it inevitable that the leaders of a democracy should affiliate mostly with plutocrats after their time in public office? Was that not related to the problems of mistrust and alienation and social distance that lurked behind the anger

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so triumphed that even a man who once led the most powerful machinery of state in the history of civilization could now say of private, plutocratic social change, “This is all that does work in the modern world.” For people to question this view is not to deny the good it

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these things. But he would not call out elites for their sins; or call for power’s redistribution and fundamental, systemic change; or suggest that plutocrats might have to surrender precious things for others to have a mere shot of transcending indecency. Someone will have to. EPILOGUE “OTHER PEOPLE ARE NOT

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to those mobs. Nicola said she could start a new initiative, which could be housed at the World Economic Forum, the organization behind the annual plutocratic reunion in Davos. In this thinking she was not alone. All across MarketWorld in that winter of revulsion, people were plotting solutions to the revolt

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a change in corporate law than to invent a parallel infrastructure of capitalism. It is not necessarily harder to seek more effective taxation of globetrotting plutocrats than to develop an elaborate annual conference getting them to give a little back. The MarketWorlders, Cordelli is reminding us, are selling themselves short. They

The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community

by David C. Korten  · 1 Jan 2001

, but the consequences in terms of foreign control and expropriation were much the same. 138 PART II: SORROWS OF EMPIRE In the 1990s, the corporate plutocrats turned to international trade agreements as their favored instrument for rewriting national laws to implement their corporate-friendly agenda of deregulation, open borders, and privatization

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who must serve them in return for the money on which their very lives depend. The rule of money works all the better for corporate plutocrats because most people are wholly unaware of the ways in which the organizing principles of Empire have become embedded in the money system. The Ultimate

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experience. The idea of creating a democratic nation with equal rights for all had no place in Inauspicious Beginning 161 the thoughts of the economic plutocrats and religious theocrats who founded the early settlements. Recognition of these early circumstances is essential to any understanding of how far we have come as

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secular power of the state to enforce the beliefs of a particular faith. It would otherwise have been impossible to establish the Union. God Loves Plutocrats It is with good reason that German sociologist and economist Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, noted a natural affinity

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those blessed with wealth and power, provides a foundation for an easy alliance between contemporary religious theocrats and contemporary corporate plutocrats. The theocrats affirm the moral righteousness of the plutocrats, and the plutocrats provide media and funding support for politicians committed to the theocrats’ restrictive social agenda. GENOCIDE When Christopher Columbus landed on

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succeeded in maintaining solidarity among working people across race, gender, and occupational lines. 210 PART III: AMERIC A, THE UNFINISHED PROJECT Labor Populists versus Labor Plutocrats The most powerful labor organization of the post–Civil War period was the Knights of Labor, formed in 1869 in Philadelphia as a secret organization

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. Leveling the Playing Field Although the federal government proved unable to enforce its own labor rights guarantees in the face of defiance by the corporate plutocrats, Roosevelt, unlike previous presidents, declined to send out troops to fight on the side of the corporations. That made all the difference. Union membership skyrocketed

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: AMERIC A, THE UNFINISHED PROJECT CULTURAL AND ECONOMIC CHALLENGES TO EMPIRE The 1960s were a time of cultural ferment. A new generation told the corporate plutocrats, “We don’t buy into your consumerism and your wars.” It told the theocrats, “We have no use for your narrow interpretations of biblical authority

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and rigid standards of sexual morality.” African Americans and women of all races were telling both plutocrats and theocrats, “We reject your efforts to define us as something less than fully human; we demand recognition of our humanity.” Traditional lines of authority

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, and Singapore, were developing strong export-oriented economies that were challenging U.S. corporations at home and abroad. Other nations were telling U.S. corporate plutocrats: “We can play the game of global competition better than you can, even on your home turf.” These developments threatened not only the hegemony of

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U.S. corporations but also the jobs of American workers. Elitist plutocrats and theocrats felt the foundations of their power and privilege eroding. Empire was at risk. The movement to choose a more democratic human future was

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the demagogues of Empire. Renewing the Historic Alliance Historically, rejection of the democratic ideal in America has coalesced around one or both of two fundamentalisms. Plutocrats, heirs to the vision of Alexander Hamilton, embrace a market fundamentalism that legitimates unaccountable rule by persons of financial means. Theocrats, heirs to the Calvinist

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religious fundamentalism that legitimates unaccountable rule by those of a prescribed faith and celebrates wealth and power as a mark of God’s favor. Although plutocrats give priority to material values and theocrats to spiritual values, their shared drive for dominator power and aversion to democracy make them allies of convenience

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. In the late 1960s, a small group of plutocrats and theocrats formed an alliance to avert the fall of Empire and drive the U.S. political center sharply to the right. It proved a

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powerful combination. The plutocrats delivered the money in record amounts for political campaigns, think tanks, and media outreach. The theocrats delivered the votes by mobilizing the resentment of the

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and corporate globalization. Influential though they were, these institutions generally functioned as polite old-boys’ clubs outside the public spotlight. This changed dramatically as leading plutocrats mobilized to reassert control of the nation’s political agenda. They launched a sophisticated and well-funded campaign to control the mass media, organize new

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of conservative economic- and social-policy proposals.13 STEALTH POLITICS The alliance faced a difficult barrier in its effort to mobilize a voter base. The plutocrats’ agenda of subverting democracy, shrinking the middle class, and making a few people fabulously wealthy and powerful at the expense of the rest does not

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. A program akin to that of Islamic fundamentalists who seek to create Islamic states, it lacks broad popular appeal. To build a loyal voter base, plutocrats and theocrats alike had to become skilled in waging stealth campaigns that played to the resentments of those who were being squeezed out of the

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to manipulate the popular culture to serve the private interests of an imperial elite. It involved a well-organized and well-funded alliance of corporate plutocrats and religious theocrats who brought money and votes to the table in an intentional bid to turn back the clock on democracy, civil liberties, the

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the near universal concern for the well-being of children and families to mobilize a political majority behind an anti-children, anti-family economic agenda. Plutocrats and neocons care little about family values, however such values might be defined, but find it useful to emphasize issues like abortion and gay marriage

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on Family Values Advertising aimed explicitly at children in the unregulated marketplace is one of the more pernicious, intentional, and well-funded assaults by corporate plutocrats on family values. Corporate advertising executives long ago became aware that it is highly lucrative to begin conditioning very young children to value individualistic materialism

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of, 223 Alexander Hamilton and, 184–185 American, 182 as bipartisan cause, 227–228 constitutional, 185–187, 341–342 corporate, 219 United States as, 185 plutocrats versus populists, 209 PNAC (Project for a New American Century), 230–231, 233 Policy Planning Study (U.S. State Department), 195 political consensus, 331–334

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, 21, 81–83, 320–322 politics of culture, 248–249 living, 345–349 stealth, 223–227 poorest people worldwide, 299 population, 59, 97 populists versus plutocrats, 209 Portugal, 127 Positive Futures Network (PFN), 14, 17–18 Post-Corporate World: Life after Capitalism (Korten), 15 potential of humanity, failure of, 36 poverty

The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America

by John Fabian Witt  · 14 Oct 2025  · 735pp  · 279,360 words

administration in 1917. The new magazine was staffed by youthful stars of the New York literary scene. Cartoonist Art Young, whose startling send-ups of plutocrats and warmongers had provoked the Wilson administration, joined the novelist John Dos Passos on the magazine’s editorial board. The essayist and critic Edmund Wilson

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Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror (Oxford University Press, 2009), 96–101; Thai Jones, More Powerful Than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York’s Year of Anarchy (Bloomsbury, 2014); Michael Willrich, American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle Between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at

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Avrich, The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States (Princeton University Press, 1980), 184–200; Thai Jones, More Powerful Than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York’s Year of Anarchy (Bloomsbury, 2014); “I.W.W. Bomb Meant for Rockefeller Kills Four of Its Makers, Wrecks Tenement and

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay

by Guy Standing  · 13 Jul 2016  · 443pp  · 98,113 words

’s what keeps me awake at night.’ One feels Johann’s pain. On the other side of the Atlantic, in Seattle, venture capitalist and fellow plutocrat Nick Hanauer, another who drew his first fat cheques from a dynastic family business, albeit one making feather bedding rather than cigarettes, was worrying about

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other assets. They have accumulated large cash hoards by keeping labour costs low, which constrains consumption at home. Concentrated in the hands of a few plutocrats and a growing elite, this ‘savings glut’ has created a stock of funds to invest in assets all over the world, much of it in

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economics, suggested that a man ‘must be rich or poor according to the quantity of labour which he can command’. On that basis, today’s plutocrats are the richest men (and women) in history, not just because they are wealthier, but because their money gives them unprecedented power. In the First

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has generated rising inequality of wealth and income, and chronic insecurity for a rapidly growing precariat. Worst of all, it has created a plutocracy and plutocratic corporations linked to concentrated financial capital that are able to gain increasing amounts of rental income by virtue of their wealth. Meanwhile, wages are stagnating

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vastly increased. It created the conditions for ‘crony capitalism’, enabling well-connected individuals and companies to take control of key sectors and turn themselves into plutocrats through opportunistic networking and clientelism. Carlos Slim became the richest man in the world by acquiring control of Mexico’s telecom sector on privatisation. Others

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was a ‘fire sale’, made under duress at a time not of the choosing of the Greek government, there was ample scope for corporations or plutocrats to gain assets and thus rental income on the cheap. Thus financial institutions, and economists working for them, shaped the global economic system in a

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as in 1995. It is symbolic that, on the edge of Geneva airport, a compound for private jets belonging to some of the world’s plutocrats abuts cramped temporary accommodation for a growing number of asylum seekers. On the other side of the Atlantic, in Washington DC, the Bretton Woods agencies

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have become part of the rhetoric of competitiveness. Quietly, countries are waging economic war using subsidies to attract capital, patent holders, property tycoons and other plutocrats, and to help exporters, with export incentives and credit guarantees. One study concluded that 90 per cent of exports from the world’s poorest countries

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the favourable treatment extended to wealthy residents deemed to be domiciled abroad. So-called ‘non-doms’, who include UK-born citizens as well as foreign plutocrats, enjoy special privileges, notably a limit on the tax they pay on foreign income. One prominent beneficiary is Viscount Rothermere, a British-born billionaire and

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in Eastern Europe. Dieter Schwarz, Lidl’s owner, is estimated to be worth some $16 billion. Why is taxpayers’ money being used to help a plutocrat expand his business? Some subsidies are ideologically inspired. Poland received over €100 billion from the EU between 2007 and 2013 and is due to receive

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, an astonishing 20 million people – 6 per cent of the population – now live in trailer parks, in the richest capitalist economy in the world. Some plutocrats have been making a lot from the growing business. Sam Zell, who is worth about $5 billion, is America’s largest mobile homes park owner

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, as in Ireland, people remain liable for mortgage debt, complete with penalties and interest, even after repossession. But while the British authorities continue to welcome plutocratic property speculators and create yet more incentives for under-occupation, in parts of Spain a new breed of politicians has taken action. The mayor of

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is a way of boosting private riches at the expense of public wealth. There was no reason to think selling off Greek islands to foreign plutocrats would boost national development or help ordinary Greeks. The depletion of the commons more generally has been a hidden part of the austerity agenda. Selling

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orthodoxy; only academics publishing in those journals could expect tenure and promotion. Encouraged by the MPS, some of the world’s most powerful financiers and plutocrats have poured vast amounts of money into so-called ‘think tanks’ intended to spread libertarian and neo-liberal views. They include the Heritage Foundation, the

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thinning of the democratic crust of society that should be of primary concern, epitomised above all by the commodification of party politics. THE GAME OF PLUTOCRATS Democracy is usually understood as a competition of political values and ideas, with informed debate preceding voting. Whatever the electoral system – ‘first-past-the-post

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1994, he travelled halfway round the world to Australia to assure Rupert Murdoch that Labour would be no threat to his interests. In the USA, plutocratic influence over politics is exemplified by two sons of a billionaire who made his early wealth from building oil refineries in the Soviet Union and

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has crystallised the commodification of politics. The situation in the UK has not gone as far, yet. However, Conservative Party campaigns are being funded by plutocrats and multinational financial and other corporations, most of which pay little or no tax in Britain. Before the 2015 general election, the annual Black and

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£6.5 million, was made co-treasurer of the party and given a peerage.21 Even more disquieting is the growing financial role of foreign plutocrats, often with questionable backgrounds. In one small but symbolic example, at the Conservatives 2014 summer fund-raising ball the wife of Putin’s ex-deputy

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better? In the USA, just six corporations own 90 per cent of the media.38 If most of the media are owned by corporations and plutocrats, is it likely that a balanced plurality of views will be presented? While media magnates have existed since the birth of newspapers, the twentieth century

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on prejudice, offering superficial analysis and a simplistic set of policies, yet still able to draw the support of millions of Americans. He inherited his plutocratic status, squandered a lot of money in bad business decisions and yet rails against the elite in his pursuit of the American presidency. His type

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. A group identity must be forged and used to mobilise energies and vision or there will be no coherent movement for change. The pitchforks the plutocrats fear will not be raised in sufficient numbers to induce concessions. In the remainder of this chapter, it will be assumed that new progressive politics

Wasps: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy

by Michael Knox Beran  · 2 Aug 2021  · 800pp  · 240,175 words

desire to rise above the Yankee passion for utility, to overcome the antipathy to graces that make life bearable. In this Bill Paley, with his plutocrat-gangster manners, could not help her, and at all events he soon lost interest in her and “abandoned her sexually,” though she was scarcely forty

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WASP good taste, a “style of life” that seemed to him “pretty close to the perfect style of an American President.” For there was no plutocratic gaucherie about the Roosevelts; they lived, Joe thought, “like a rather old-fashioned American gentleman’s family in ‘comfortable circumstances,’ ” and there was nothing in

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, into moneymaking, into the development, and above all the exploitation and exhaustion at the most rapid rate possible, of our natural resources…” These industrialists and plutocrats were, Roosevelt said, “shortsighted and selfish,” but they were also masterful. Under their alien regime the descendants of the Brahmins—the New England statesmen and

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eighteenth-century Constitution could never do the work, Adams believed, of a “twenty-million horse-power” nation, nor could it contain the new forms of plutocratic power that were coming into being with the explosion of industrial force. Predatory financiers like Jay Gould, whose net stretched from New York’s Tammany

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of the State Department. In writing his various histories, not least his history of himself, Henry Adams was to find a way to dish the plutocrats and party hacks who, he said, had done the “most to block his intended path in life.” But his work would be little more than

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his first wife (Alice’s mother) “because of the concept that you only loved once and you never loved again.” II. Dante had abused the plutocrats of his own time in a manner hardly less unseemly, and he rejoiced in the thought of Filippo Argenti—Silver Philip, who shod his horse

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, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid.” The “vigorous and unscrupulous” energies of the plutocrats had torn “society to pieces and trampled it under foot,” while a discontented citizenry perpetually chased a brighter sun that continually eluded it. But these

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sympathy for the work of men like Dr. Rainsford shows him to have been a humane figure, with a broader range of sensibility than narrower plutocrats possessed. Much has been made of his interest in art: he was drawn to it and collected a great deal of it—more than a

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he continued be faithful to Cragston, his country house on the west bank of the Hudson—an area that had become unfashionable—he dutifully patronized plutocratic Newport. The charming, rather low-key summer colony that Henry James likened to a “little white hand” had by the turn of the century become

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humanists who resented the degradation of taste they associated with the new rich. Young George Cabot Lodge deplored this alien “money power,” with its “philistine-plutocrat” ideals, and he lamented the way it was ruining his favorite summer colonies, while Edith Wharton (no Mrs. Mingott she) looked down on Gilded Age

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headquarters of the new establishment. For if the Episcopal Church and the New England prep school promoted the Gilded Age marriage of pedigreed blood and plutocratic cash over which Morgan presided, New York was, more often than not, the scene of the actual consummation. Boston, with its hieratic cruelties and its

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“malefactors of great wealth,” threatened the stability of the Republic. Yet Taft, a WASP of the cautious, high and dry school, seemed to coddle the plutocrats. In doing so he threatened to bring the “gold-ridden, capitalist-bestridden, usurer-mastered” future Roosevelt feared that much closer. H. G. Wells recalled how

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Harvard, Percival Lowell, the astronomer whom Jack Chapman beat up, and Amy Lowell, the Imagist poet. Lovett was connected through his father to the new plutocratic wealth of the Harrimans and to the Brown Brothers firm, where bankers like Ellery Sedgwick James, George Herbert Walker, and Walker’s son-in-law

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so far as to say “there is little doubt that Henry inherited the family passion to be first in the nation,” but found that a “plutocratic-democracy was not apt to take well to one with such an ‘education’ ” as his. See Vidal, “The Four Generations of the Adams Family,” in

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, 64. “damned telephone book”: Amory, Proper Bostonians, 13. overstimulated: In this reading of American history, Adams’s own ancestors played a part in inventing the plutocrats: men who, for all their faults, enlarged the sphere of prosperity. The difficulty was that the creators of the Republic failed to supply anything that

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might encounter such old WASPs as Cotty Peabody, Bishop Lawrence, Dr. Drury of St. Paul’s School, and Harvard’s President Eliot, as well as plutocrats newly initiated, among them the Rockefellers. “little white hand”: Henry James, The American Scene (New York: Harper, 1907), 203. “vulgarest society in the world”: Tyler

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, 319. effort to forestall inflation: Douglas Irwin, “What Caused the Recession of 1937–38?” VoxEU & CEPR, September 11, 2011. government mandarinism: Henry Adams warned that plutocrats might “ultimately succeed in directing government itself,” a fear Roosevelt echoed when he said that private power in the United States threatened to become “stronger

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

by J. Bradford Delong  · 6 Apr 2020  · 593pp  · 183,240 words

and others to make fortunes.”26 One word of Mill’s stands out to me: “imprisonment.” Yes, Mill saw a world with more and richer plutocrats and a larger middle class. But he also saw the world of 1871 as not just a world of drudgery—a world in which humans

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-Yin, migration from China to European-settled California and to the rest of the temperate-climate settler colonies and ex-colonies was quickly shut down. Plutocrats such as Leland Stanford (the railroad baron and governor of California who founded and endowed Stanford University in memory of his son) might have favored

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of migration raised wages in Europe, as workers at home faced less competition for jobs and could buy cheap imports from the New World.18 Plutocrat and populist alike benefited. Indeed, there is no sign that workers already on the labor-scarce western, peripheral side of the Atlantic lost out as

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, the prospects for spreading broad prosperity and stabilizing democracy looked good. The politico-economic system seemed to be working: the rising prosperity made aristocrats and plutocrats feel that the slow erosion of their relative social position was a price worth paying for the good things they received, and made those lower

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women, agricultural subsidies, a federal minimum wage, public financing of political campaigns, and Florida real estate. The Democratic Party of 1900 or so was against plutocrats, bankers, and monopolists. It was for a rough equality. But it was a strange kind of rough equality among the right sort of people. Socialist

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stomp down the Talented Tenth wherever they appeared. Politicians and interest groups, fearing white populism, sensed the possibility of anger directed at rich urban eastern plutocrats and worked hard to redirect it into anger at lazy Negroes. Those who stuck to the goal of a relatively egalitarian income distribution in the

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the Social Democratic Party of Germany split off, never forgave, and never forgot. From then on, their principal adversary was not the monarchists, not the plutocrats, not the center-right, not the fascists, but rather Ebert’s party, the Social Democrats. The Austro-Hungarian emperor, Karl I, likewise abdicated in November

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brought on the Great Depression—how was not quite clear, but, as Franklin Roosevelt put it, there was near consensus that the oligarchs and the plutocratic financiers needed to be cast down “from their high seats in the temple of our civilization.”8 Competition needed to rule. The Great Depression had

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middle and the working classes of the global north, who were paying for continued steady growth for the upper-middle class and the explosion of plutocrat wealth, it has meant inflation-adjusted paychecks growing at only 0.5 to 1 percent per year. Plus there were the effects of inclusion: if

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after they died was not only impolitic but immoral: theft. This revived and restored form of pseudo-classical semi-liberalism was earnestly supported by a plutocrat-funded network of think tanks and “astroturf” interest groups. (“Don’t tell me that you are speaking for the people,” I heard Treasury Secretary Lloyd

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for a large proportion of the wealth to be inherited. It is normal for its distribution to be highly unequal. It is normal for a plutocratic elite, once formed, to use its political power to shape the economy to its own advantages. And it is normal for this to put a

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drag on economic growth. Rapid growth like that which occurred between 1945 and 1973, after all, requires creative destruction; and, because it is the plutocrats’ wealth that is being destroyed, they are unlikely to encourage it. Why, then, did the neoliberal era last? It had pointed out that social democracy

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and, in their minds, at least, neutralized by the fact that they no longer received the respect from women, minorities, and foreigners—or from the plutocrats growing in wealth and salience in their mental pictures of the world—that was their expectation, and that they saw as their due. Somehow, things

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1491

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One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger

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AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future

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Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex

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Gravity's Rainbow

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The Fountainhead

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Crash of the Titans: Greed, Hubris, the Fall of Merrill Lynch, and the Near-Collapse of Bank of America

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The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger

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A People's History of the United States

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Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines

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Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events

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Reaching for Utopia: Making Sense of an Age of Upheaval

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The Trains Now Departed: Sixteen Excursions Into the Lost Delights of Britain's Railways

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Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity

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