Our world’s billionaires don’t merit either their billions, the economist Didier Jacobs suggests, or the right to claim we’re somehow all living in a ‘meritocracy.’
In our deeply unequal times, historian Edward O’Donnell reminds us, the life of the 19th century’s most important critic of concentrated wealth remains as relevant as ever.
That just may be Martine Durand, the chief statistician of the developed world’s top research agency. How does she view her role and our inequality data future? Too Much asked.
From the days of slavery to the 21st century rebirth of the poll tax, our tax system has been concentrating wealth at African-American expense, as legal scholar Andre Smith is documenting.
Click here to read the Too Much monthly issue for October 2015. The moneymaking techniques today generating mega millions and more, the global business analyst Sam Wilkin is making plain, almost all rest on schemes for defeating the forces of honest market competition.
No 13-digit fortune has yet appeared on the horizon. But if we wait until we get close enough to see one, warns wealth analyst Bob Lord, we may find our plutocracy set eternally in concrete.
In any society where great stashes of wealth amass at the top, philosopher Elizabeth Anderson reminds us, the wealthy will sooner or later see most of the rest of us as failures.
Inequality has our planet down, the veteran analyst Juliet Schor believes, but not out. She’s seeing more and more of us working for alternatives to mindless consumerism — and the failing economic system that so relentlessly generates it.
In the United States, top corporate execs sometimes make more in an hour than their workers can make in a year. At Mondragon, one of Spain’s largest companies, no execs can make more in an hour than their workers make in a day.
What do corporate chiefs want out of the latest global trade talks? On their wish list: a veto over government decisions that complicate their profiteering. Will they get that veto power? Trade union analyst Thea Lee sees reasons they just might not.