Plutocrats Quotes

“Americans were happy to celebrate their super-rich and, at least sometimes, worry about their poor. But putting those two conversations together and talking about economic inequality was pretty much taboo.”
― Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

“A 2011 OECD report showed that, over the past three decades, in Sweden, Finland, Germany, Israel, and New Zealand--all countries that have chosen a version of capitalism less red in tooth and claw than the American model--inequality has grown as fast as or faster than in the United States. France, proud, as usual, of its exceptionalism, seemed to be the one major Western outlier, but recent studies have shown that over the past decade it, too, has fallen into line.”
― Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

“In 1980, the average U.S. CEO made forty-two times as much as the average worker. By 2012, that ratio had skyrocketed to 380.”
― Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

“Globalization and the technology revolution have allowed the 1 percent to prosper; but as the plutocrats have been getting richer and more powerful, the collapse of the Treaty of Detroit has meant we have taxed and regulated them less. It is a return to the first gilded age not only because we are living through an economic revolution, but also because the rules of the game again favor those who are winning it.”
― Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

“Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We have no paupers. . . . The great mass of our population is of laborers; our rich, who can live without labor, either manual or professional, being few, and of moderate wealth. Most of the laboring class possess property, cultivate their own lands, have families, and from the demand for their labor are enabled to exact from the rich and the competent such prices as enable them to be fed abundantly, clothed above mere decency, to labor moderately and raise their families. . . . The wealthy, on the other hand, and those at their ease, know nothing of what the Europeans call luxury. They have only somewhat more of the comforts and decencies of life than those who furnish them. Can any condition of society be more desirable than this?”
― Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

“In 2005, Bill Gates was worth $46.5 billion and Warren Buffett $44 billion. That year, the combined wealth of the 120 million people who made up the bottom 40 percent of the U.S. population was around $95 billion—barely more than the sum of the fortunes of these two men.”
― Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

“Political decisions helped to create the super-elite in the first place, and as the economic might of the super-elite class grows, so does its political muscle.”
― Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

“for 99 percent of Americans, incomes increased by a mere 0.2 percent. Meanwhile, the incomes of the top 1 percent jumped by 11.6 percent. It was definitely a recovery—for the 1 percent.”
― Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

“Significant paradigm shifts...are notoriously hard to foresee.
...Even after the revolution has begun,...most of us are reluctant to admit that the world has changed.
...And once we recognize that the world has changed, most of us are very bad at adapting our behavior to the new reality.”
― Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

“As the world economy grows, and as the super-elite, in particular, get richer, the superstars who work for the super-rich can charge super fees. Consider the 2009 legal showdown between Hank Greenberg and AIG, the insurance giant he had built. It was a high-stakes battle, as AIG accused Greenberg, through a privately held company, Starr International, of misappropriating $4.3 billion worth of assets. For his defense, Greenberg hired David Boies. With his trademark slightly ratty Lands’ End suits (ordered a dozen at a time by his office online), his midwestern background, his proud affection for Middle American pastimes like craps, and his severe dyslexia (he didn’t learn how to read until he was in the third grade), Boies comes across as neither a superstar nor a member of the super-elite. But he is both. Boies and his eponymous firm earned a reputed $100 million for the nine-month job of defending Greenberg. That was one of the richest fees earned in a single litigation. Yet, for Greenberg, it was a terrific deal. When you have $4.3 billion at risk, $100 million—only 2.3 percent of the total—just isn’t that much money. (Further sweetening the transaction was the judge’s eventual ruling that AIG, then nearly 80 percent owned by the U.S. government, was liable for up to $150 million of Greenberg’s legal fees, but he didn’t know that when he retained Boies.) It”
― Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

“Where things get really complicated is 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. They are lifelong libertarians who are genuinely skeptical about climate change. They also happen to own a company whose assets include oil refineries, oil pipelines, and lumber mills—all businesses that would benefit from a weakened EPA.”
― Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

“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 deals and golf dates and care a lot more about where you got your MBA than the country you were raised in. It’s the Middle Ages all over again, these little unaffiliated duchies and fiefdoms, flying their own flags and ready to take in any vassal who will pledge his life to the manor. Everybody busy patting himself on the back because the Reds went in the dumper is going to be wondering who won when Coca-Cola applies for a seat in the U.N. —Scott Turow, Pleading Guilty”
― Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

“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 1 percent and everyone else shrank; the income share of the top 1 percent fell from nearly 16 percent in 1940 to under 7 percent in 1970. In 1980, the average U.S. CEO made forty-two times as much as the average worker. By 2012, that ratio had skyrocketed to 380. Taxes were high—the top marginal rate was 70 percent—but robust economic growth of an average 3.7 percent per year between 1947 and 1977 created a broadly shared sense of optimism and prosperity. This was the golden age of the American middle class, and it is no accident that our popular culture remembers it so fondly. The western Europe experience was broadly similar—strong economic growth, high taxes, and an extensive social welfare network.”
― Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

“The clash between growing political equality and growing economic inequality is, in many ways, the big story of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century in the Western world. In the United States, this conflict gave rise to the populist and progressive movements and the trust-busting, government regulation, and income tax the disgruntled 99 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—by 1944 the top tax rate was 94 percent. In 1897, the year of the Bradley Martin ball, incomes taxes did not yet exist.”
― Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

“the Long 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.”
― Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

“They tend to believe in the institutions that permit social mobility, but are less enthusiastic about the economic redistribution—i.e., taxes—it takes to pay for those institutions. Perhaps most strikingly, they are becoming a transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home. Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today’s super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves.”
― Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

“1,000,000 people overseas can do your job. What makes you so special? —A 2009 billboard above Highway 101, the road that connects Silicon Valley with San Francisco”
― Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

“Larry Summers, the Harvard economist and former secretary of the Treasury, is hardly a radical. Yet he points out that America’s economic growth over the past decade has been so unevenly shared that, for the middle class, “for the first time since the Great Depression, focusing on redistribution makes more sense than focusing on growth.”
― Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

“The switch from the America of the Great Compression to the America of the 1 percent is still so recent that our intuitive beliefs about how capitalism works haven’t caught up with the reality. In fact, surging income inequality is such a strong violation of our expectations that most of us don’t realize it is happening.”
― Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

“when the discussion shifts from celebratory to analytical, the super-elite get nervous.”
― Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

“I’ve never understood in my life why all these dictators, when they stole, why didn’t they just steal a billion and spend the rest on the people.”
― Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else