Illusions Revolt!

Jeff Bezos is now the richest person in the world. Reed Saxon/AP Photo By   Andrew D. Hwang , College of the Holy Cross The world’s wealthiest are prospering. As of February 2017, there were about 2,000 billionaires in the world . This micro-elite controls over US$7.6 trillion , an increase of 18 percent from 2016. A billionaire’s spending power is difficult to grasp, both because most people do not correctly intuit large numbers , and because a billion dollars far outstrips most people’s experience. What does a household budget look like to a billionaire? To find out, let’s scale down a billionaire’s income to $50,000, the median American income , adjusting budget items proportionally. A year in the life of Joe Billionaire To start, we need to estimate a billionaire’s annual income. In the 30 years from 1987 to 2016, Bill and Melinda Gates amassed about $120 billion. This figure represents $80 billion in net worth and $40 bill...

We are just beginning to understand one further dimension of toxic inequality: a devastating emotional and physiological phenomenon we might call “toxic inequality syndrome.” Thomas Piketty’s best-selling 2014 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, brought attention to a different kind of inequality with a focus on capital. Yet many popular and academic accounts of inequality, spurred by media coverage and the emerging national discourse, continued to focus on income disparities, economic class, and the mega-rich. A preoccupation with income led to an insufficient understanding of the new inequality that left wealth out of the picture. President Barack Obama provided perhaps the crowning moment in this new public attention to economic inequality when he proclaimed in a December 2014 speech that inequality “is the defining challenge of our time.” But the president’s speech referenced income inequality eleven times and wealth inequality once. Leaving wealth out of the conversatio...

They say money can’t buy you happiness, but a new study indicates that it can definitely buy you a longer life. Published in British medical journal The Lancet, the report shows that the wealthiest Americans outlive the poorest by about 10 to 15 years. Despite medical and technological advancements as well as the push for healthcare…