Illusions Revolt!

Originally posted at theconversation.com 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 billion controlled by their charitable foundation. The Gates’ average annual income for these years is $120 billion divided by 30, or $4 billion. ...

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...

REN With national policy likely to compound the income and wealth gap in the coming years, states and localities are fighting back. Across the country, local jurisdictions aren’t waiting for federal action or corporate governance reforms to close the wage gap. In December, for example, the city of Portland, Oregon, passed an ordinance to raise the business tax on companies with CEOs who earn more than 100 times the median pay of their workers. Portland officials said the ordinance is the first of its kind in the country. And now, more cities and states are poised to follow suit. Read more >

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...