The Haves and Have-Yachts Quotes

“In Silicon Valley, it’s common to hear the prediction that artificial intelligence will yield a world of two broad classes: those who tell the AI what to do and those whom the AI tells what to do.”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“Alfani notes a pattern that unfolds “repeatedly and systematically across history”: when economic elites become ingrown, impenetrable, and “insensitive to the plight of the masses,” societies tend to become unstable.”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“On the ground where I grew up, some of America’s powerful people championed a version of capitalism that liberates wealth from responsibility.”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“In 1963, John Kenneth Galbraith, the liberal economist and adviser to the Kennedys, mocked the modern conservative for being engaged in “one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is, the search for a truly superior moral justification for selfishness.”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“private power has such control over what we see and hear, it has a power that rivals or exceeds that of elected government.”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“Today, no sector exemplifies more clearly the threat of bigness to democracy than Big Tech.” He added, “When a concentrated”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“Approximately 117 million people earned, on average, the same income that they did in 1980, while the typical income for the top one percent had nearly tripled.”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“In 2016, the National Bureau of Economic Research published an analysis by the economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, which found that half of American adults have been “completely shut off from economic growth since the 1970s.”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“The media is under attack now. They wonder, Is the court system next? Do we go from ‘fake news’ to ‘fake evidence’? For people whose existence depends on enforceable contracts, this is life or death.”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“the English writer G. K. Chesterton wondered what the big boats foretold of a nation’s fabric. “The poor man really has a stake in the country,” he wrote. “The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht.”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration.”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“A generation whose parents had clambered out of the working class was amusing itself to distraction in a world of proliferating screens and cheap consumption—“prole drift,”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“History is the graveyard of elites,” Pareto wrote, in perhaps his most oft-quoted—and oft-misunderstood—observation. What he was predicting was not an end to the elite but, rather, its constant regeneration.”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“Pareto’s metaphor was the river. If it is not moving anymore, and it’s becoming crystallized, then you are more likely to have a revolt, because of forces rising up.”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“To prevent that kind of instability, Pareto believed, the upper echelons of power must stay open to new contestants, in a process that he called the “circulation of elites.”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“as a front-line worker. Today, that figure is 278 times.”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“Jack London, in 1908, published The Iron Heel, imagining an America under a fascist oligarchy in which “nine-tenths of one per cent” hold “seventy per cent of the total wealth.”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“Johnson said, “If we had a more equal distribution of income, and much more money and energy going into public school systems, parks and recreation, the arts, and health care, it could take an awful lot of sting out of society. We’ve largely dismantled those things.”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“The poor man really has a stake in the country,” he wrote. “The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht.”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich