America’s super-rich feel aggrieved in part because they believe themselves to be fundamentally different from a leisured, hereditary gentry.
[…]
“We are the one per cent that came from the ninety-nine per cent, and we want to see more of the ninety-nine per cent move in our direction, but we fear the President’s policies discourage that from happening.”
gq:
The Truth about Income Inequality in AmericaGuess what, compatriots? The gap between the richest and the poorest among us is now wider than it has been since we all nose-dived into the Great Depression. So GQ sent Jon Ronson on a journey into the secret financial lives of six different people on the ladder, from a guy washing dishes for 200 bucks a week in Miami to a self-storage gazillionaire. What he found are some surprising truths about class, money, and making it in America.
The art: Tina Barney, The Son, 1987.
The news: “Secret Fears of the Super-Rich: Does great wealth bring fulfillment? An ambitious study by Boston College suggests not. For the first time, researchers prompted the very rich - people with fortunes in excess of $25 million - to speak candidly about their lives. The result is a surprising litany of anxieties: their sense of isolation, their worries about work and love, and most of all, their fears for their children,” by Graeme Wood in The Atlantic.
The source: Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Money doesn’t buy happiness, but having no money pretty much guarantees misery.
The four richest men share a combined wealth bigger than that of the 57 poorest countries together.
Just to give an idea of the magnitude, I checked the Wikipedia page for the index of poorest countries. To measure this wealth, I used the gross domestic product (GDP) at purchasing power parity (PPP) per capita, that is, the value of all final goods and services produced within a nation in a given year divided by the average (or mid-year) population for the same year. To put it in layman terms, this index tells us the total money value of all final goods and services that are produced in an economy over a period of time.
This is the list of the 20 poorest ones (by decreasing order; meaning Zimbabwe is the poorest in the list), together with the population figures in millions. This gives us a combined population of 339.8 million people. I do not have the time to go through all 57 countries, but I believe this shortened list gives a good idea. The combined wealth of this four men, equals the combined production of these countries in a given year (population figures in millions next to each country):
Now, I would love for someone to come and tell me that privilege, as a concept to analyze socioeconomic facts and trends, does not exist.
(via redlightpolitics)
From PRI: Nothing to add but this: wow.
(via publicradiointernational)
