We are the 99%

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pages: 173 words: 54,729

Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America by Writers For The 99%

Bay Area Rapid Transit, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, Day of the Dead, desegregation, feminist movement, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, independent contractor, intentional community, it's over 9,000, McMansion, microaggression, Mohammed Bouazizi, Occupy movement, Port of Oakland, We are the 99%, young professional

This is not to say that we have always successfully adhered to the model set forth by the movement–our organization, like OWS, is an imperfect work in progress—but we have tried to observe its principles of direct democracy, consensus-based decision making, inclusiveness, and transparency. As we go to press with this book, at the beginning of December 2011, many aspects of the future course of Occupy Wall Street remain unclear. But one thing is starkly evident: Under the banner “We are the 99%”, the protest has given birth to America’s most important progressive movement since the civil rights marches half a century ago. We hope, in the pages that follow, to tell the story of that beginning. Beginnings “Are you ready for a Tahrir moment?” —Call from Adbusters, July 13th 2011 Occupy Wall Street is part of a global movement that has reached nearly every continent in the last year.

Severely outnumbered, the handful of police on the bridge turned and walked toward Brooklyn, all the while shouting on their radios. As the march took the roadway, several protesters who had taken the pedestrian walk hopped the railing to join the occupation of the bridge. But as marchers swarmed the roadway chanting, “We are the 99 percent!” “Banks got bailed out! We got sold out!” and “Whose bridge? Our bridge!” the police quickly regrouped and established a barricade using the increasingly ubiquitous orange mesh fence, which was unfurled mid-span to stop them. Those near the front of the march, halted in their tracks, could not see the back of the march from the bridge’s center, but whispers began to circulate that the police had completely enclosed them.

As the march kicked off, hundreds poured out of Washington Square’s southeastern corner. Bearing signs such as “Student Debt = Indentured Servitude,” “They Call It Class War Only When We Fight Back!,” “Why are so many out of work . . . When there is so much work to be done??,” and “We Want Our Future Back,” the marchers turned onto the sidewalks along Fourth Street, chanting “We! Are! The 99 percent!” They swarmed around food carts and by the plaza adjoining NYU’s Stern School of Business, where several students, some dressed in suits and ties, looked on with light-hearted skepticism. Initially the march stuck to the sidewalks, with only a handful of students walking in the streets alongside traffic.


pages: 504 words: 129,087

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America by Charlotte Alter

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microaggression, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, TaskRabbit, tech bro, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, white picket fence, working poor, Works Progress Administration

under thirty supported the movement: Public Policy Polling, “Americans See Occupy Movement Better Than Tea Party,” October 13, 2011, publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/PPP_Release_US_1013925.pdf. called “We Are the 99 Percent.”: “We Are the 99 Percent,” October 14, 2013, wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/. “doctor without health insurance.”: “We Are the 99 Percent,” 2, wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/page/2. “I’m taking my future back.”: “We Are the 99 Percent,” 2, wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/page/5. “and asked to borrow rent.”: “We Are the 99 Percent,” 5, wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/page/5. 750 cities around the world: Simon Rogers, “Occupy protests around the world: full lists visualised,” November 14, 2011, The Guardian, theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/oct/17/occupy-protests-world-list-map.

Older people were more skeptical of Occupy, but roughly two in five Americans under thirty supported the movement. The internet allowed Occupy’s message to spread to exactly the people who needed to hear it. The phrase “We are the 99%” articulated a sense of mass collective solidarity that went viral almost immediately. Tumblr became a bulletin board of financial despair as young people began posting pictures of themselves online holding handwritten summaries of their debt on a page called “We Are the 99 Percent.” “I am a 21 year old college student. I have over $20,000 in student loans and more to go. The best job I can get pays me $7.50 an hour. I’ve been concerned that I may have a serious medical condition but am terrified of going to the doctor without health insurance.”

This wasn’t an orator addressing a crowd—it was the voice of the crowd itself, sometimes halting, rarely eloquent, but a collective voice nonetheless. The sentences were short and digestible to maximize the efficiency, and they took on the quality of a call-and-response musical refrain, a kind of singsong solidarity. Mass power was their message (“We are the 99%”) but it was also their method. One sign even spelled it out: WE’RE HERE, WE’RE UNCLEAR, GET USED TO IT. Occupiers felt no need to sharpen their collective demands to a single concrete point, because any one demand might exclude hundreds of other priorities. There was no single objective but dozens, hundreds, or none, depending on whom you asked.


pages: 291 words: 90,200

Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age by Manuel Castells

"World Economic Forum" Davos, access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, call centre, centre right, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, income inequality, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Port of Oakland, social software, statistical model, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

Available at: <http://www.fastcompany.com/1792974/why-occupy-wall-street-uses-vpns>. Wagstaff, K. (2012) Occupy the Internet: Protests give rise to DIY data networks. Techland, Time. Available at: <http://techland.time.com/2012/03/28/occupy-the-internet-protests-give-rise-to-diy-networks/>. Weinstein, A. (2011) “We are the 99%” creators revealed. Mother Jones. Available at: <http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/10/we-are-the-99-percent-creators>. On organization and decision-making in the camps Graeber, D. (2011a) Enacting the impossible (on consensus decision making). Occupy Wall Street. Available at: <http://occupywallst.org/article/enacting-the-impossible/>. Graeber, D. (2011b) Occupy Wall Street’s anarchist roots.

The analysis by Gilad Lotan on Twitter traffic related to the movement shows that the peaks are associated with crucial moments in the movement, such as the first attempt to evict the occupation of Zuccotti Park on October 13.7 In most instances of threatened police action against occupations, Twitter networks alerted thousands, and their instant mobilization in solidarity played a role in protecting the occupiers. Using Twitter from their cell phones, the protesters were able to constantly distribute information, photos, videos and comments to build a real-time network of communication overlaid on the occupied space. The 99% theme was popularized, in large part, by the “We are the 99%” Tumblr page, started in mid-August, in advance of the September 17 protests, by Chris (who chose not to give his last name) and Priscilla Grim, who both work professionally in media in New York, and were involved in social activism. At first, both chose to remain anonymous, writing “Brought to you by the people who will Occupy Wall Street.”

Tumblr allows users to be part of collaboratively produced group blogs. They can “reblog” others’ posts to post them onto their Tumblr blog and share the post with their own followers. And it is easy to implement a form that allows users to submit anonymous messages. This was crucial for the spread of the “We are the 99%” group because Tumblr provided a platform for personal storytelling in anonymity, with most people hiding their faces in the video, yet narrating their personal drama in coping with an unjust society. In October 2011, the group site was receiving about 100 submissions a day. As of February 2012 there were 225 pages of posts.


pages: 329 words: 95,309

Digital Bank: Strategies for Launching or Becoming a Digital Bank by Chris Skinner

algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, bank run, Basel III, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, demand response, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, gamification, Google Glasses, high net worth, informal economy, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, margin call, mass affluent, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Pingit, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pre–internet, QR code, quantitative easing, ransomware, reserve currency, RFID, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, software as a service, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, the long tail, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K

The result was that the movement rippled across America, with Occupy Seattle, Occupy San Francisco, Occupy Chicago and, shortly after, Occupy London, Occupy Sydney, Occupy Tokyo and more emerging. A global movement through Twitter and social media. The movement then gathered more focus through a website called “We are the 99%” on Tumblr, a social blogging service. The 99% are the masses of poor who have no wealth and see the 1% - the politicians, the bankers, the priests, the people in power – taking all the power and wealth from them. The movement was spawned by the birth of the Occupy movement, and describe themselves as: We are the 99%. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution.

We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we’re working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1% is getting everything. We are the 99%. The story of how the 99% came around is that a New Yorker called Chris decided to publicise the Occupy Wall Street march that was due to take place on September 17th 2011 by asking people to put a photo of themselves holding a sign that explained their financial situation on the page he created called We are the 99 percent. Chris immediately forgot about the page and got on with other things but, four days later, came back and found hundreds of photos had been submitted.

The photos being posted proved to have a major emotional impact, and the blog went viral with protestors adopting the phrase “We Are The 99 Per Cent” as a slogan, writing it on signs and banners. It is quite clear from the emergence of the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement and the 99% that these and many other social movements would just not exist in the same way without Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Change and the power of today’s social internet. Equally, the real revolution of these networks is that they allow critical mass of new movements to be linked globally within days, as demonstrated by the We are the 99% story. In banking, we see these changes occurring rapidly too.


pages: 284 words: 92,387

The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement by David Graeber

Bretton Woods, British Empire, company town, corporate personhood, David Graeber, deindustrialization, dumpster diving, East Village, feminist movement, financial innovation, George Gilder, John Markoff, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, Lao Tzu, late fees, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, Occupy movement, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, planetary scale, plutocrats, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, working poor

a Specifics of how these consensus tools work will be covered in Chapter 4. b As a matter of historical record, since there is so much discussion of the origin of the slogan “We Are the 99 Percent,” the answer is that—appropriately enough—it was a collective creation. I threw in the 99 percent part, Begonia and Luis added the “we,” and the verb was ultimately by added by Chris, of Food Not Bombs, when he created the “We Are the 99 Percent” tumblr page a month later. c Though it’s worthwhile to point out this is untrue. The number would be more like 37th: New York City would come in just ahead of Tunisia, and just behind Portugal.

Americans in either of those overlapping categories—the working class and underemployed graduates with crippling student loans—are actually paying more of their income to Wall Street than they pay to the government in taxes. Back in September, even before the occupation began, Chris—the Food Not Bombs activist who helped us create the first democratic circle in Bowling Green in August—set up a web page on tumblr called “We Are the 99 Percent,” where supporters could post pictures of themselves, holding up a brief account of their life situations. At the time of this writing there are more than 125 pages of these, their authors varying enormously in race, age, gender, and just about everything else. Recently there was an Internet discussion about the “ideology of the 99 percent” as revealed by these testimonies.

How did there come to be such an enormous gap between the way so many Americans actually viewed the world—including a population of young people, most of whom were prepared to contemplate jettisoning the capitalist system entirely—and the opinions that could be expressed in its public forums? Why do the human stories revealed on the We Are the 99% tumblr never seem to make it to the TV, even in (or especially in) “reality” television? How, in a country that claims to be a democracy, did we arrive at a situation where—as the occupiers stressed—the political classes seem unwilling to even talk about the kind of issues and positions ordinary Americans actually held?


pages: 284 words: 85,643

What's the Matter with White People by Joan Walsh

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, banking crisis, clean water, collective bargaining, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, full employment, General Motors Futurama, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, mass immigration, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

After a lifetime on the fractious American left, I felt stranded on the sidelines without a side: a civil rights integrationist stuck in a world of narrow boxes; a working-class Irish Catholic San Franciscan jousting with Beltway and Ivy League elites; an American who loves my country fighting charges that I’m un-American from an increasingly vicious right. One party, my own, had lost its spine; the other lost its mind. I knew that change lay in a broader definition of common ground, and I saw hope in the rising realization that “We are the 99 percent.” Yet if we are the 99 percent, why do we so often fail to get a majority of the country to listen to us? • • • I had the broad outlines of an answer, as others had put much of the evidence together before me. I’d seen it over and over. Democrats do best when they can unite around a vision of economic improvement for everybody; they get derailed when Republicans toss culture war grenades or play on race.

Preface A few days after the Occupy Wall Street movement began to stir in September 2011, I walked the narrow streets of the world’s financial hub in a light rain, looking for a protest still too small to find. During the next few weeks, OWS would change the national conversation. The slogan “We are the 99 percent” did what years of complaint by economists and liberals could not: it focused attention on staggering income inequality and “the top 1 percent” who’d enriched themselves phenomenally during the past thirty years. “I am so scared of this anti–Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death,” Frank Luntz, the GOP’s master of spin, told a private meeting of Republican governors at the end of 2011.

It seems as if we are continually having our attention drawn back to the same spot, trying to get democracy right, as we struggle over America’s place in the world. Certainly, democracy seemed to come alive again there, as the movement to wrest control of the country from Wall Street and the wealthiest 1 percent spread to hundreds of American cities and into other Western countries. “We are the 99 percent” became an updated version of e pluribus unum, “out of many, one.” I think about the Hard Hat Riot all these years later because it symbolized the culmination of a Republican political strategy that has worked nearly flawlessly for almost my entire life. No matter what’s going on in the world, the right can find a cultural issue that will get the left to fight itself, to atomize into little groups, and to give voice to factions that frighten Americans on the sidelines—often, the left-out white middle and working class—and the country winds up the worse for it.


pages: 537 words: 99,778

Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement by Amy Lang, Daniel Lang/levitsky

activist lawyer, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bonus culture, British Empire, capitalist realism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, different worldview, facts on the ground, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, housing justice, Kibera, late capitalism, lolcat, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, plutocrats, Port of Oakland, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Slavoj Žižek, social contagion, structural adjustment programs, the medium is the message, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, white flight, working poor

* We believe that private and for-profit colleges and universities, which are largely financed through student debt, should open their books. * We believe that the current student debt load should be written off. In acknowledgment of these beliefs, I am signing the Debtors’ Pledge of Refusal. ♦ occupystudentdebtcampaign.org/pledges/ occupystudentdebtcampaign.org/our-principles/ WE ARE THE 99% The Mortville Declaration of Independence 5 October 2011 We, the people of Mortville, reject global capitalism and the consumer-based identities it imposes upon the populace. We acknowledge that race, class, gender and sexual orientation have been systematically transformed into marketing schemes to sell us our identities at the expense of the global poor and the human spirit.

Republicans don’t rule. Corporations reign. Plutocrats decide. Finance capital rules. Capitalism works for the 1% and against the other 99%, and is therefore fundamentally illegitimate. Discredited are the nonsense phrases about how ‘government has to live within its means’, and ‘the rich are the job-creators’. ‘We are the 99%’ may not be deep analysis of political economy, but it’s a promising start, an open door, an invitation to investigate and explain how inequality and injustice are not bugs in the system, but have always been its basic features. These were utterances which six months ago were deemed outside and beyond sensible political discourse.

One hears many such excuses, many distancing memes: it’s too white, those people are so privileged, they don’t speak for me. Even bracketing the illogic of applying ‘privilege’ to militant activists drenched in rain and freezing temperatures, these are flimsy apologetics. Occupy Wall Street has already inserted itself into every conversation in America, and it’s this level of rhetoric – we are the 99% – not the odd poster, that should concern us. If you don’t agree with the messaging, it’s on you to change it. If you feel it’s not diverse enough, add your body to the mix. In this consensus-based process, participation is our most valuable critical faculty. One should also recognize the instability of OWS as observable spectacle.


pages: 181 words: 50,196

The Rich and the Rest of Us by Tavis Smiley

"there is no alternative" (TINA), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, ending welfare as we know it, F. W. de Klerk, fixed income, full employment, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, job automation, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, traffic fines, trickle-down economics, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor

It was Facebook postings, Twitter tweets, and other technological tools that engaged the world and legitimized the revolts in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, and elsewhere. In America, the wealthy one percent now find themselves in the grip of a highly contagious social-media campaign ignited by five undeniable and powerful words: “We are the 99 percent!” BREAKING FREE “Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.” —Carl Sagan Throughout American history, there have been proud moments of revolution that forced the elite to remove their blinders of greed, tyranny, and domination. A powerful British monarchy was blind to the unfair taxation and denial of basic liberties that bred revolt in the colonies.

But Wall Street and politics are so tightly infused they couldn’t even draw the line at that moment, and that’s why we’ve reached a point where Wall Street abused the public, it abused the trust, it violated the laws, because every one of our big firms, whether it’s Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch or JP Morgan, they’re paying fines right now for what they did against the securities laws, and yet they’ve remained in charge.” The Occupy Wall Street key slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” is “rigorously accurate,” Sachs said. While “the rich have never been richer,” the government continues to give them preference while gutting services that poor people need for education, health care, and other vital necessities. Because the top 1 percent walked away with the prize, struggling Americans are fed up.


pages: 478 words: 126,416

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

The ability of the senior employees of large corporations to appropriate significant fractions of corporate revenues for their own purposes mirrors, perhaps, the lavish lifestyle opportunities once exploited by prelates and courtiers. And so the combination of the bonus culture in the financial sector and its associated activities, a new generation of robber baron and the multimillionaire CEO has produced a reversal of the egalitarian trends of most of the twentieth century. ‘We are the 99 per cent’ was the slogan of the ‘Occupy’ protesters, drawing attention to the degree to which a small minority have benefited disproportionately during the era of financialisation. At the end of the First World War ‘the 1 per cent’ – the highest-earning percentile of the income distribution – received between 15 and 20 per cent of gross income.

But there is no organisation that collects these voices.6 And I have come to believe that many people inside and outside the industry feel intimidated by what they perceive to be the pervasive (though publicly silent – they rarely engage in open debate) power and influence of global investment banks. That power and that influence ensure that fundamental structural reform of the financial sector is not a realistic short-term prospect. Yet it is intrinsic to oligarchy that oligarchs are a small minority, a point graphically made in the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ slogan of ‘We are the 99 per cent’. But it is easier to identify what the 99 per cent are against than what they are for. When I walked through St Paul’s Churchyard, incongruously placed in the centre of the City of London and the chosen site of Britain’s demonstrators, I located a sign saying ‘Ban High Frequency Trading’, but I could not find the author of the sign, or anyone who would engage in well-informed critique.

.: Hyperion 220 Loomis, Carol 108 lotteries 65, 66, 68, 72 Lucas, Robert 40 Lynch, Dennios 108 Lynch, Peter 108, 109 M M-Pesa 186 Maastricht Treaty (1993) 243, 250 McCardie, Sir Henry 83, 84, 282, 284 McGowan, Harry 45 Machiavelli, Niccolò 224 McKinley, William 44 McKinsey 115, 126 Macy’s department store 46 Madoff, Bernard 29, 118, 131, 132, 177, 232, 293 Madoff Securities 177 Magnus, King of Sweden 196 Manhattan Island, New York: and Native American sellers 59, 63 Manne, Henry 46 manufacturing companies, rise of 45 Marconi 48 marine insurance 62, 63 mark-to-market accounting 126, 128–9, 320n22 mark-to-model approach 128–9, 320n21 Market Abuse Directive (MAD) 226 market economy 4, 281, 302, 308 ‘market for corporate control, the’ 46 market risk 97, 98, 177, 192 market-makers 25, 28, 30, 31 market-making 49, 109, 118, 136 Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MIFID) 226 Markkula, Mike 162, 166, 167 Markopolos, Harry 232 Markowitz, Harry 69 Markowitz model of portfolio allocation 68–9 Martin, Felix 323n5 martingale 130, 131, 136, 139, 190 Marx, Groucho 252 Marx, Karl 144, 145 Capital 143 Mary Poppins (film) 11, 12 MasterCard 186 Masters, Brooke 120 maturity transformation 88, 92 Maxwell, Robert 197, 201 Mayan civilisation 277 Meade, James 263 Means, Gardiner 51 Meeker, Mary 40, 167 Melamed, Leo 19 Mercedes 170 merchant banks 25, 30, 33 Meriwether, John 110, 134 Merkel, Angela 231 Merrill Lynch 135, 199, 293, 300 Merton, Robert 110 Metronet 159 Meyer, André 205 MGM 33 Microsoft 29, 167 middleman, role of the 80–87 agency and trading 82–3 analysts 86 bad intermediaries 81–2 from agency to trading 84–5 identifying goods and services required 80, 81 logistics 80, 81 services from financial intermediaries 80–81 supply chain 80, 81 transparency 84 ‘wisdom of crowds’ 86–7 Midland Bank 24 Milken, Michael 46, 292 ‘millennium bug’ 40 Miller, Bill 108, 109 Minuit, Peter 59, 63 Mises, Ludwig von 225 Mittelstand (medium-size business sector) 52, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172 mobile banking apps 181 mobile phone payment transfers 186–7 Modigliani-Miller theorem 318n9 monetarism 241 monetary economics 5 monetary policy 241, 243, 245, 246 money creation 88 money market fund 120–21 Moneyball phenomenon 165 monopolies 45 Monte Carlo casino 123 Monte dei Paschi Bank of Siena 24 Montgomery Securities 167 Moody’s rating agency 21, 248, 249, 313n6 moral hazard 74, 75, 76, 92, 95, 256, 258 Morgan, J.P. 44, 166, 291 Morgan Stanley 25, 40, 130, 135, 167, 268 Morgenthau, District Attorney Robert 232–3 mortality tables 256 mortgage banks 27 mortgage market fluctuation in mortgage costs 148 mechanised assessment 84–5 mortgage-backed securities 20, 21, 40, 85, 90, 100, 128, 130, 150, 151, 152, 168, 176–7, 284 synthetic 152 Mozilo, Angelo 150, 152, 154, 293 MSCI World Bank Index 135 muckraking 44, 54–5, 79 ‘mugus’ 118, 260 multinational companies, and diversification 96–7 Munger, Charlie 127 Munich, Germany 62 Munich Re 62 Musk, Elon 168 mutual funds 27, 108, 202, 206 mutual societies 30 mutualisation 79 mutuality 124, 213 ‘My Way’ (song) 72 N Napoleon Bonaparte 26 Napster 185 NASA 276 NASDAQ 29, 108, 161 National Economic Council (US) 5, 58 National Employment Savings Trust (NEST) 255 National Institutes of Health 167 National Insurance Fund (UK) 254 National Provincial Bank 24 National Science Foundation 167 National Westminster Bank 24, 34 Nationwide 151 Native Americans 59, 63 Nazis 219, 221 neo-liberal economic policies 39, 301 Netjets 107 Netscape 40 Neue Markt 170 New Deal 225 ‘new economy’ bubble (1999) 23, 34, 40, 42, 98, 132, 167, 199, 232, 280 new issue market 112–13 New Orleans, Louisiana: Hurricane Katrina disaster (2005) 79 New Testament 76 New York Stock Exchange 26–7, 28, 29, 31, 49, 292 New York Times 283 News of the World 292, 295 Newton, Isaac 35, 132, 313n18 Niederhoffer, Victor 109 NINJAs (no income, no job, no assets) 222 Nixon, Richard 36 ‘no arbitrage’ condition 69 non-price competition 112, 219 Norman, Montagu 253 Northern Rock 89, 90–91, 92, 150, 152 Norwegian sovereign wealth fund 161, 253 Nostradamus 274 O Obama, Barack 5, 58, 77, 194, 271, 301 ‘Obamacare’ 77 Occidental Petroleum 63 Occupy movement 52, 54, 312n2 ‘Occupy Wall Street’ slogan 305 off-balance-sheet financing 153, 158, 160, 210, 250 Office of Thrift Supervision 152–3 oil shock (1973–4) 14, 36–7, 89 Old Testament 75–6 oligarchy 269, 302–3, 305 oligopoly 118, 188 Olney, Richard 233, 237, 270 open market operations 244 options 19, 22 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 263 Osborne, George 328n19 ‘out of the money option’ 102, 103 Overend, Gurney & Co. 31 overseas assets and liabilities 179–80, 179 owner-managed businesses 30 ox parable xi-xii Oxford University 12 P Pacific Gas and Electric 246 Pan Am 238 Paris financial centre 26 Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards 295 partnerships 30, 49, 50, 234 limited liability 313n14 Partnoy, Frank 268 passive funds 99, 212 passive management 207, 209, 212 Patek Philippe 195, 196 Paulson, Hank 300 Paulson, John 64, 109, 115, 152, 191, 284 ‘payment in kind’ securities 131 payment protection policies 198 payments system 6, 7, 25, 180, 181–8, 247, 259–60, 281, 297, 306 PayPal 167, 168, 187 Pecora, Ferdinand 25 Pecora hearings (1932–34) 218 peer-to-peer lending 81 pension funds 29, 98, 175, 177, 197, 199, 200, 201, 208, 213, 254, 282, 284 pension provision 78, 253–6 pension rights 53, 178 Perkins, Charles 233 perpetual inventory method 321n4 Perrow, Charles 278, 279 personal financial management 6, 7 personal liability 296 ‘petrodollars’ 14, 37 Pfizer 96 Pierpoint Morgan, J. 165 Piper Alpha oil rig disaster (1987) 63 Ponzi, Charles 131, 132 Ponzi schemes 131, 132, 136, 201 pooled investment funds 197 portfolio insurance 38 Potts, Robin, QC 61, 63, 72, 119, 193 PPI, mis-selling of 296 Prebble, Lucy: ENRON 126 price competition 112, 219 price discovery 226 price mechanism 92 Prince, Chuck 34 private equity 27, 98, 166, 210 managers 210, 289 private insurance 76, 77 private sector 78 privatisation 39, 78, 157, 158, 258, 307 probabilistic thinking 67, 71, 79 Procter & Gamble 69, 108 product innovation 13 property and infrastructure 154–60 protectionism 13 Prudential 200 public companies, conversion to 18, 31–2, 49 public debt 252 public sector 78 Q Quandt, Herbert 170 Quandt Foundation 170 quantitative easing 245, 251 quantitative style 110–11 quants 22, 107, 110 Quattrone, Frank 167, 292–3 queuing 92 Quinn, Sean 156 R railroad regulation 237 railway mania (1840s) 35 Raines, Franklin 152 Rajan, Raghuram 56, 58, 79, 102 Rakoff, Judge Jed 233, 294, 295 Ramsey, Frank 67, 68 Rand, Ayn 79, 240 ‘random walk’ 69 Ranieri, Lew 20, 22, 106–7, 134, 152 rating agencies 21, 41, 84–5, 97, 151, 152, 153, 159, 249–50 rationality 66–7, 68 RBS see Royal Bank of Scotland re-insurance 62–3 Reagan, Ronald 18, 23, 54, 59, 240 real economy 7, 18, 57, 143, 172, 190, 213, 226, 239, 271, 280, 288, 292, 298 redundancy 73, 279 Reed, John 33–4, 48, 49, 50, 51, 242, 293, 314n40 reform 270–96 other people’s money 282–5 personal responsibility 292–6 principles of 270–75 the reform of structure 285–92 robust systems and complex structures 276–81 regulation 215, 217–39 the Basel agreements 220–25 and competition 113 the origins of financial regulation 217–19 ‘principle-based’ 224 the regulation industry 229–33 ‘rule-based’ 224 securities regulation 225–9 what went wrong 233–9 ‘Regulation Q’ (US) 13, 14, 20, 28, 120, 121 regulatory agencies 229, 230, 231, 235, 238, 274, 295, 305 regulatory arbitrage 119–24, 164, 223, 250 regulatory capture 237, 248, 262 Reich, Robert 265, 266 Reinhart, C.M. 251 relationship breakdown 74, 79 Rembrandts, genuine/fake 103, 127 Renaissance Technologies 110, 111, 191 ‘repo 105’ arbitrage 122 repo agreement 121–2 repo market 121 Reserve Bank of India 58 Reserve Primary Fund 121 Resolution Trust Corporation 150 retirement pension 78 return on equity (RoE) 136–7, 191 Revelstoke, first Lord 31 risk 6, 7, 55, 56–79 adverse selection and moral hazard 72–9 analysis by ‘ketchup economists’ 64 chasing the dream 65–72 Geithner on 57–8 investment 256 Jackson Hole symposium 56–7 Kohn on 56 laying bets on the interpretation of incomplete information 61 and Lloyd’s 62–3 the LMX spiral 62–3, 64 longevity 256 market 97, 98 mitigation 297 randomness 76 socialisation of individual risks 61 specific 97–8 risk management 67–8, 72, 79, 137, 191, 229, 233, 234, 256 risk premium 208 risk thermostat 74–5 risk weighting 222, 224 risk-pooling 258 RJR Nabisco 46, 204 ‘robber barons’ 44, 45, 51–2 Robertson, Julian 98, 109, 132 Robertson Stephens 167 Rockefeller, John D. 44, 52, 196 Rocket Internet 170 Rogers, Richard 62 Rogoff, K.S. 251 rogue traders 130, 300 Rohatyn, Felix 205 Rolls-Royce 90 Roman empire 277, 278 Rome, Treaty of (1964) 170 Rooney, Wayne 268 Roosevelt, Franklin D. v, 25, 235 Roosevelt, Theodore 43–4, 235, 323n1 Rothschild family 217 Royal Bank of Scotland 11, 12, 14, 24, 26, 34, 78, 91, 103, 124, 129, 135, 138, 139, 211, 231, 293 Rubin, Robert 57 In an Uncertain World 67 Ruskin, John 60, 63 Unto this Last 56 Russia defaults on debts 39 oligarchies 303 Russian Revolution (1917) 3 S Saes 168 St Paul’s Churchyard, City of London 305 Salomon Bros. 20, 22, 27, 34, 110, 133–4 ‘Salomon North’ 110 Salz Review: An Independent Review of Barclays’ Business Practices 217 Samuelson, Paul 208 Samwer, Oliver 170 Sarkozy, Nicolas 248, 249 Savage, L.J. 67 Scholes, Myron 19, 69, 110 Schrödinger’s cat 129 Scottish Parliament 158 Scottish Widows 26, 27, 30 Scottish Widows Fund 26, 197, 201, 212, 256 search 195, 209, 213 defined 144 and the investment bank 197 Second World War 36, 221 secondary markets 85, 170, 210 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) 20, 64, 126, 152, 197, 225, 226, 228, 230, 232, 247, 292, 293, 294, 313n6 securities regulation 225–9 securitisation 20–21, 54, 100, 151, 153, 164, 169, 171, 222–3 securitisation boom (1980s) 200 securitised loans 98 See’s Candies 107 Segarra, Carmen 232 self-financing companies 45, 179, 195–6 sell-side analysts 199 Sequoia Capital 166 Shad, John S.R. 225, 228–9 shareholder value 4, 45, 46, 50, 211 Sharpe, William 69, 70 Shell 96 Sherman Act (1891) 44 Shiller, Robert 85 Siemens 196 Siemens, Werner von 196 Silicon Valley, California 166, 167, 168, 171, 172 Simon, Hermann 168 Simons, Jim 23, 27, 110, 111–12, 124 Sinatra, Frank 72 Sinclair, Upton 54, 79, 104, 132–3 The Jungle 44 Sing Sing maximum-security gaol, New York 292 Skilling, Jeff 126, 127, 128, 149, 197, 259 Slim, Carlos 52 Sloan, Alfred 45, 49 Sloan Foundation 49 small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs), financing 165–72, 291 Smith, Adam 31, 51, 60 The Wealth of Nations v, 56, 106 Smith, Greg 283 Smith Barney 34 social security 52, 79, 255 Social Security Trust Fund (US) 254, 255 socialism 4, 225, 301 Société Générale 130 ‘soft commission’ 29 ‘soft’ commodities 17 Soros, George 23, 27, 98, 109, 111–12, 124, 132 South Sea Bubble (18th century) 35, 132, 292 sovereign wealth funds 161, 253 Soviet empire 36 Soviet Union 225 collapse of 23 lack of confidence in supplies 89–90 Spain: property bubble 42 Sparks, D.L. 114, 283, 284 specific risk 97–8 speculation 93 Spitzer, Eliot 232, 292 spread 28, 94 Spread Networks 2 Square 187 Stamp Duty 274 Standard & Poor’s rating agency 21, 99, 248, 249, 313n6 Standard Life 26, 27, 30 standard of living 77 Standard Oil 44, 196, 323n1 Standard Oil of New Jersey (later Exxon) 323n1 Stanford University 167 Stanhope 158 State Street 200, 207 sterling devaluation (1967) 18 stewardship 144, 163, 195–203, 203, 208, 209, 210, 211, 213 Stewart, Jimmy 12 Stigler, George 237 stock exchanges 17 see also individual stock exchanges stock markets change in organisation of 28 as a means of taking money out of companies 162 rise of 38 stock-picking 108 stockbrokers 16, 25, 30, 197, 198 Stoll, Clifford 227–8 stone fei (in Micronesia) 323n5 Stone, Richard 263 Stora Enso 196 strict liability 295–6 Strine, Chancellor Leo 117 structured investment vehicles (SIVs) 158, 223 sub-prime lending 34–5, 75 sub-prime mortgages 63, 75, 109, 149, 150, 169, 244 Summers, Larry 22, 55, 73, 119, 154, 299 criticism of Rajan’s views 57 ‘ketchup economics’ 5, 57, 69 support for financialisation 57 on transformation of investment banking 15 Sunday Times 143 ‘Rich List’ 156 supermarkets: financial services 27 supply chain 80, 81, 83, 89, 92 Surowiecki, James: The Wisdom of Crowds xi swap markets 21 SWIFT clearing system 184 Swiss Re 62 syndication 62 Syriza 306 T Taibbi, Matt 55 tailgating 102, 103, 104, 128, 129, 130, 136, 138, 140, 152, 155, 190–91, 200 Tainter, Joseph 277 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas 125, 183 Fooled by Randomness 133 Tarbell, Ida 44, 54 TARGET2 system 184, 244 TARP programme 138 tax havens 123 Taylor, Martin 185 Taylor Bean and Whitaker 293 Tea Party 306 technological innovation 13, 185, 187 Tel Aviv, Israel 171 telecommunications network 181, 182 Tesla Motors 168 Tetra 168 TfL 159 Thai exchange rate, collapse of (1997) 39 Thain, John 300 Thatcher, Margaret 18, 23, 54, 59, 148, 151, 157 Thiel, Peter 167 Third World debt problem 37, 131 thrifts 25, 149, 150, 151, 154, 174, 290, 292 ticket touts 94–5 Tobin, James 273 Tobin tax 273–4 Tolstoy, Count Leo 97 Tonnies, Ferdinand 17 ‘too big to fail’ 75, 140, 276, 277 Tourre, Fabrice ‘Fabulous Fab’ 63–4, 115, 118, 232, 293, 294 trader model 82, 83 trader, rise of the 16–24 elements of the new trading culture 21–2 factors contributing to the change 17–18 foreign exchange 18–19 from personal relationships to anonymous markets 17 hedge fund managers 23 independent traders 22–3 information technology 19–20 regulation 20 securitisation 20–21 shift from agency to trading 16 trading as a principal source of revenue and remuneration 17 trader model 82, 83 ‘trading book’ 320n20 transparency 29, 84, 205, 210, 212, 226, 260 Travelers Group 33, 34, 48 ‘treasure islands’ 122–3 Treasuries 75 Treasury (UK) 135, 158 troubled assets relief program 135 Truman, Harry S. 230, 325n13 trust 83–4, 85, 182, 213, 218, 260–61 Tuckett, David 43, 71, 79 tulip mania (1630s) 35 Turner, Adair 303 TWA 238 Twain, Mark: Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar 95–6 Twitter 185 U UBS 33, 134 UK Independence Party 306 unemployment 73, 74, 79 unit trusts 202 United States global dominance of the finance industry 218 house prices 41, 43, 149, 174 stock bubble (1929) 201 universal banks 26–7, 33 University of Chicago 19, 69 ‘unknown unknowns’ 67 UPS delivery system 279–80 US Defense Department 167 US Steel 44 US Supreme Court 228, 229, 304 US Treasury 36, 38, 135 utility networks 181–2 V value discovery 226–7 value horizon 109 Van Agtmael, Antoine 39 Vanderbilt, Cornelius 44 Vanguard 200, 207, 213 venture capital 166 firms 27, 168 venture capitalists 171, 172 Vickers Commission 194 Viniar, David 204–5, 233, 282, 283, 284 VISA 186 volatility 85, 93, 98, 103, 131, 255 Volcker, Paul 150, 181 Volcker Rule 194 voluntary agencies 258 W wagers and credit default swaps 119 defined 61 at Lloyd’s coffee house 71–2 lottery tickets 65 Wall Street, New York 1, 16, 312n2 careers in 15 rivalry with London 13 staffing of 217 Wall Street Crash (1929) 20, 25, 27, 36, 127, 201 Wall Street Journal 294 Wallenberg family 108 Walmart 81, 83 Warburg 134 Warren, Elizabeth 237 Washington consensus 39 Washington Mutual 135, 149 Wasserstein, Bruce 204, 205 Watergate affair 240 ‘We are the 99 per cent’ slogan 52, 305 ‘We are Wall Street’ 16, 55, 267–8, 271, 300, 301 Weber, Max 17 Weill, Sandy 33–4, 35, 48–51, 55, 91, 149, 293, 314n40 Weinstock, Arnold 48 Welch, Jack 45–6, 48, 50, 52, 126, 314n40 WestLB 169 Westminster Bank 24 Whitney, Richard 292 Wilson, Harold 18 windfall payments 14, 32, 127, 153, 290 winner’s curse 103, 104, 156, 318n11 Winslow Jones, Alfred 23 Winton Capital 111 Wolfe, Humbert 7 The Uncelestial City 1 Wolfe, Tom 268 The Bonfire of the Vanities 16, 22 women traders 22 Woodford, Neil 108 Woodward, Bob: Maestro 240 World Bank 14, 220 World.Com bonds 197 Wozniak, Steve 162 Wriston, Walter 37 Y Yellen, Janet 230–31 Yom Kippur War (1973) 36 YouTube 185 Z Zurich, Switzerland 62


pages: 211 words: 78,547

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement by Fredrik Deboer

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, David Brooks, defund the police, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, global pandemic, helicopter parent, income inequality, lockdown, obamacare, Occupy movement, open immigration, post-materialism, profit motive, QAnon, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, social distancing, TikTok, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, working poor, zero-sum game

They took over the park—they occupied Wall Street—and in so doing created a spectacle of resistance that attracted the attention of a country that was simmering with resentment toward the financial industry. The protesters were an eclectic bunch, drawn from all manner of organizations and groups rather than from any one in particular. They spoke of a broken and rigged economy, a system designed to enrich the rich while leaving the rest of us behind. It was at Occupy that the “We Are the 99 Percent” slogan was first given national attention, meaning the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution, whose interests (said the protesters) were inherently antagonistic to the richest 1 percent. The slogan neatly captured the class dynamics that the protesters gathered to decry. Another slogan was popularized there, a much less widely publicized slogan but one with admirable style: “Shit Is Fucked Up and Bullshit.”

This is the fundamental appeal of all true-left politics. Everyone has to pay the rent. Almost everyone has lean months and hard years. Many people struggle to afford groceries; everybody, at some stage, feels wronged by the boss but unable to do anything about it. I have my misgivings about the “We Are the 99 Percent” framing that emerged from Occupy; in my first book, I argued that we must pay equal attention to the divide between the bottom 80 percent and the top 20 percent, given the way that the top quintile (my quintile) has pulled away from the rest of the country. But the basic wisdom that impossibly wealthy individuals and institutions have rigged the deck against the common man is as true as it has ever been and represents a great messaging opportunity.


pages: 611 words: 130,419

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Jean Tirole, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, litecoin, low interest rates, machine translation, market bubble, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, publish or perish, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, yellow journalism, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

Bitcoin and the Fear of Inequality In addition to tapping into anarchist sentiment and the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto, the Bitcoin story is a story of the desire for economic empowerment. During the twenty-first century, as economic inequality in advanced countries has increased rapidly, many people feel helpless, and they desire greater control over their economic lives. Bitcoin prices first took off around the time of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street / “We are the 99%” protests. Adbusters, a social activist organization that wanted its message to go viral, launched these protests in the United States, and Occupy protests occurred in many other countries too. It is no coincidence that the Bitcoin narrative is one of individual empowerment, because, according to the narrative, the coins are anonymous and free of government control, management, and reach.

Notably, 2012 was the same year that home prices in the United States started rising sharply again after the 2007–9 world financial crisis. It was also the year in which the police finally cleared the Occupy Wall Street movement, which had started a year earlier, from Zuccotti Park in New York City. The movement had been attracting much attention to the slogan “We Are the 99%,” referring to the majority of the population who cannot live extravagantly, in a public assertion that these people matter. The “Mansion” section seemed to scream that the top 1% mattered even more. It featured lush photo spreads of lavish homes and their pretentious occupants in a tone of gushing admiration.

See also labor unions Wagner, Robert, 184 Walker, Edmond, 250 Wall Street Journal “Mansion” section, 224–25 Wanniski, Jude, 44–45 war metaphors, 17 Warner/Chappell Music, 98 wars: inflation during, 265–66. See also Civil War, US; World War I; World War II war to end all wars, 242 Washington, George, 100–101, 102, 117, 177 Washington Mutual (WaMu) bank run, 135 Watson, IBM computer on Jeopardy, 207 The Way the World Works (Wanniski), 44 “We are the 99%” protests of 2011, 8, 225 weather forecasting, 123–25 Weems, Mason Locke, 100 Weiman, Rita, 139 Welch, Ivo, 300 welfare mother, narrative on, 49–50 When Washington Shut Down Wall Street (Silber), 94 Whewell, William, 12 White, Hayden, 37 Whitman, Walt, 165 Wicked (Broadway musical), 172 Wicked (Maguire), 172 Wikipedia, 7 Wikiquotes, 102 wikis, 7 Williams, James D., 147 Wilson, E.


pages: 82 words: 21,414

The Myth of Meritocracy: Why Working-Class Kids Still Get Working-Class Jobs (Provocations Series) by James Bloodworth

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, cognitive dissonance, Downton Abbey, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, income inequality, light touch regulation, meritocracy, precariat, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, zero-sum game

Why, after all, should ordinary people suffer when a small minority appear to be doing so well? Originating in a 2006 documentary about the growing gap between a wealthy American elite and the rest of society, the term ‘1 per cent’ has spawned an extensive literature on both sides of the Atlantic. Its corollary – ‘We are the 99 per cent’ – was the slogan adopted by the influential anti-capitalist protest movement Occupy Wall St. Political grumbling about inequality never went away, of course, but the global financial crash of 2008 dragged it firmly back into the mainstream. A cataclysm largely caused by the reckless lending of American banks was – and in fact still is – being paid for by austerity programmes that disproportionately hit the poorest.


pages: 324 words: 86,056

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality by Bhaskar Sunkara

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, inventory management, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, land reform, land value tax, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Occupy movement, postindustrial economy, precariat, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%

Even some of Occupy’s most radical-sounding sound bites had mainstream, even genteel, roots. The slogan “We are the 99 percent, they are the 1 percent” might have found its wings in Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, but its origins actually lie in a May 2011 Vanity Fair article by retired World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz. The call captured popular discontent, and even the Congressional Budget Office seized on the phrase in a report issued about a month after Occupy began.10 “We are the 99 percent” resonated for a reason. Between 1979 and 2007, income for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans increased by 275 percent, or a total of $700,000 in new annual income, on average.


pages: 309 words: 91,581

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Timothy Noah

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, Branko Milanovic, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, manufacturing employment, moral hazard, oil shock, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, positional goods, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, rent control, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, upwardly mobile, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

A chart showing this found its way into President Obama’s first budget, prompting the Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger to call it “the most politically potent squiggle along an axis since Arthur Laffer drew his famous curve on a napkin in the mid-1970s.” But where Laffer’s squiggle was an argument to lower taxes, Piketty and Saez’s (the conservative Henninger noted with some dismay) was an argument to raise them on the rich.6 It was also what later inspired 2011’s Occupy Wall Street protest slogan, “We are the 99 percent.” • The top 0.1 percent (Really and Stinking; today, everybody making at least $1.7 million) tripled their share of the national income during the Great Divergence, from 3 to 10 percent. • The top 0.01 percent (Stinking; today, everybody making at least $9.1 million) nearly quadrupled their share of the national income during the Great Divergence, from 1.4 to 5 percent.7 Notice a pattern?

Ellen Byron, “As Middle Class Shrinks, P&G Aims High and Low,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 12, 2001, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904836104576558861943984924.html. Sam Grobart, “Bells and Whistles Descend upon the Throne,” New York Times, Oct. 12, 2011. Don Peck, Pinched: How the Great Recession Has Narrowed Our Futures & What We Can Do About It (New York: Crown, 2011), 100. “We Are the 99 Percent,” Web testimonials, Oct. 13, 2011, accessed Oct. 14, 2011, at http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/page/2. 1. Alan Blinder, “The Level and Distribution of Economic Well-Being,” Working Paper 488 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1980), 2. Hereafter the National Bureau of Economic Research will be referred to as NBER. 2.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

I talked with the protesters to hear their stories firsthand; I participated in the “people’s microphone,” the clever technique used to get around the ban on amplified sound. Every speaker addressing the crowd paused at the end of each phrase, giving those nearby time to repeat it aloud, with the volume amplified by many voices so that those farther away could hear. The rallying cry of the movement was “We are the 99%,” a slogan coined by two online activists to highlight the realization, which had recently penetrated the popular consciousness, that 1% of the US population now earned 25% of the national income and owned 40% of its wealth. They began a campaign on Tumblr, a short-form blogging site with hundreds of millions of users.

My husband’s fuel costs are almost one of his bi-weekly paychecks. We are in a loss mitigation and loan modification program with our mortgage lender, and struggling with everything we have to keep our little house. I got a 2% raise in June, but my paycheck actually got smaller because my health insurance costs went up. We are the 99%.” “I have had no job for over 2½ years. Black men have a 20% unemployment rate. I am 33 years old. Born and raised in Watts. I am the 99%.” “I am nineteen. I have wanted kids in my future for a long time. Now I am scared that the future will not be an OK place for my kids. I am the 99%.” “I am retired.

Hancock, “Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 17, 2014, updated with PNAS “Editorial Expression of Concern and Correction,” July 22, 2014, http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full.pdf. 227 “we are all lab rats”: Vindu Goel, “Facebook Tinkers with Users’ Emotions in News Feed Experiment, Stirring Outcry,” New York Times, June 29, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/face book-tinkers-with-users-emotions-in-news-feed-experiment-stirring-outcry.html. 228 with apologies to Pedro Domingos: This is a reference to the title of Domingos’s book, The Master Algorithm (New York: Basic Books, 2015). 228 “damn good for CBS”: Eliza Collins, “Les Moonves: Trump’s Run Is ‘Damn Good for CBS,’” Politico, June 29, 2016, http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/02/les-moonves-trump-cbs-220001. CHAPTER 11: OUR SKYNET MOMENT 230 The messages were powerful and personal: “We Are the 99 Percent,” tumblr.com, September 14, 2011, http://weare the99percent.tumblr.com/page/231. 231 “AI systems must do what we want them to do”: “An Open Letter: Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence,” Future of Life Institute, retrieved April 1, 2017, https://futureoflife.org/ai-open-letter/. 231 “unconstrained by a need to generate financial return”: Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and OpenAI, “Introducing OpenAI,” OpenAI Blog, December 11, 2015, https://blog.openai.com/introduc ing-openai/. 232 best friend of one autistic boy: Judith Newman, “To Siri, with Love,” New York Times, October 17, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/fashion/how-apples-siri-became-one-autistic-boys-bff.html. 234 overpopulation on Mars: “Andrew Ng: Why ‘Deep Learning’ Is a Mandate for Humans, Not Just Machines,” Wired, May 2015, retrieved April 1, 2017, https://www.wired.com/brandlab/2015/05/andrew-ng-deep-learning-mandate-humans-not-just-machines/. 235 change how we think and how we feel: Emeran A.


pages: 372 words: 109,536

The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money by Frederik Obermaier

air gap, banking crisis, blood diamond, book value, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, family office, Global Witness, high net worth, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, mega-rich, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, out of africa, race to the bottom, vertical integration, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

It’s the family offices, asset management companies, banks, investment advisers, tax experts, and of course Mossack Fonseca itself. All for the 1 per cent. [ ] One per cent. From that figure, an established political term has evolved to denote the richest 1 per cent of a country. In the US, the term was turned on its head to provide the slogan of a political movement: ‘We are the 99%’. This was chanted by supporters of the Occupy Wall Street movement; ‘99%’ was scrawled across placards and banners. It was an outcry against the excesses and omnipotence of capitalism, the type of outcry that’s rare today. In his bestseller The Unwinding, US author George Packer describes, precisely and without getting worked up, how the financial elite have dominated the US economy, the absurd repercussions this has for the rest of the country and why citizens who weren’t previously especially politically engaged suddenly got involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement: because they felt betrayed by ‘them up there’.

Everything was going well for us, but then at the end of 2006, I became pregnant and had to stay in bed for four months due to pre-eclampsia. During this time, I was fired. 2011: We’ve sold all our possessions to give our daughter what she needs. I can’t find another job. Our house has just been sold in a forced auction. I AM SCARED. WE ARE THE 99%.’ Why are we telling you this? Because so far, we haven’t found anyone like this woman in our data. And it wouldn’t be too wild to assume that we won’t be finding people like her in our data in the future. The more complicated and opaque offshore structures are, the more expensive they are.


pages: 121 words: 36,908

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase

Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion pricing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, do what you love, Dogecoin, Donald Shoup, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, full employment, future of work, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kim Stanley Robinson, litecoin, mass incarceration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, pattern recognition, peak oil, plutocrats, post-work, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, private military company, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Gordon, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart meter, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck

What is so dangerous, rather, is the way they manifest themselves in an economy dedicated to maximizing profits and growth, and in which money and power are held in the hands of a tiny elite. The growing inequality of wealth and income in the world has become an increasing focus of attention from activists, politicians, and pundits. Occupy Wall Street struck a chord with the slogan “we are the 99 percent,” drawing attention to the fact that almost all the gains from economic growth in recent decades have accrued to 1 percent or less of the population. Economist Thomas Piketty scored an improbable best seller with Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a massive treatise about the history of wealth and the prospect of an increasingly unequal world.22 The two crises I’ve described are fundamentally about inequality as well.


pages: 409 words: 125,611

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of DNA, Doha Development Round, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population

The resulting article, “Of the 1 Percent, by the 1 Percent, for the 1 Percent,” did have a far wider readership than my Econometrica article decades earlier. The new social order that my Vanity Fair article discussed—the 99 percent of Americans who were in the same stagnating boat—became the slogan of the Occupy Wall Street movement: “We are the 99 percent.” It presented the thesis that reverberates through the articles here and my subsequent writing: almost all of us, including many in the 1 percent, would actually be better off if there were less inequality. It was in the enlightened self-interest of the 1 percent to help construct a less divided society.

He has worked closely with me on all of the articles I have written for Vanity Fair, of which four are included here. Most importantly for this volume, he solicited and worked diligently with me in writing the article “Of the 1 Percent, by the 1 Percent, for the 1 Percent,” which, in turn, gave rise to my book The Price of Inequality and this book. Graydon Carter suggested the title for that article. “We are the 99%” became the slogan of the Occupy Wall Street movement, symbolizing America’s Great Divide. The arrangements I made with Project Syndicate, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, and a host of other media, reflected in the articles collected here, gave me the opportunity to express my views on what was happening in the world—to be a pundit, perhaps more thoughtful than those who are forced to offer their opinions on a huge range of topics on the Sunday morning shows, because I could both choose my topics and mull over the answers.


pages: 142 words: 45,733

Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis by Benjamin Kunkel

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, creative destruction, David Graeber, declining real wages, full employment, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, means of production, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, peak oil, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, savings glut, Slavoj Žižek, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, vertical integration, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

They are indignant at being made to repair their governments’ books through higher taxes and reduced salaries and benefits. In Chile, excessive interest rates on student loans figured among the main grievances in demonstrations throughout the southern winter. And the Occupy movement in the US—whose slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” was reportedly first floated by Graeber himself—has condemned not only the maldistribution of wealth but the related vice of massive consumer debt, in the form of mortgages, student loans, and usurious interest rates on credit cards. Generally speaking, the 1 percent lends and the rest borrow.


pages: 247 words: 43,430

Think Complexity by Allen B. Downey

Benoit Mandelbrot, cellular automata, Conway's Game of Life, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, discrete time, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Guggenheim Bilbao, Laplace demon, mandelbrot fractal, Occupy movement, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, seminal paper, sorting algorithm, stochastic process, strong AI, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%

The Occupy Movement Wealth inequality has partly fueled a modern social movement known as the Occupy movement. The first significant Occupy protest was on Wall Street in New York City, where thousands of protesters gathered to express their dismay with the distribution of wealth, among other things. The movement’s motto is “We are the 99%,” reminding politicians to serve the majority, not the 1% who control more than a third of the nation’s wealth. A major goal of the movement is to achieve a more equal distribution of income, which protesters hope to accomplish by implementing a more progressive tax policy. One of the effects of taxation is to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor.


pages: 177 words: 50,167

The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics by John B. Judis

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, mass immigration, means of production, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, open borders, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, Winter of Discontent

It suggested coming up with “a deceptively simple Trojan Horse demand . . . that is impossible for President Obama to ignore.” The organizers failed to come up with a single demand—there seemed to be too many of them, most of which demanded an end to the reign of neoliberalism—but on a new Occupy Wall Street website, they came up with a simple slogan, borrowed from the original AmpedStatus post, “We are the 99 percent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent.” That slogan, which framed the protest in populist terms, defined the movement as an attack on growing political and economic inequality. On September 17, somewhere over a thousand demonstrators showed up and about 300 ended up camping out on Zuccotti Park.


pages: 198 words: 52,089

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It by Richard V. Reeves

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, desegregation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, knowledge economy, land value tax, longitudinal study, meritocracy, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, positional goods, precautionary principle, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working-age population, zero-sum game

Some humility and generosity is required. But there is clearly some work to do in terms of raising awareness. Right now, there is something of a culture of entitlement among America’s upper middle class. Partly this is because of a natural tendency to compare ourselves to those even better off than us. This is the “we are the 99 percent” problem. But it is also because we feel entitled to our position since it results from our own merit: our education, brains, and hard work. These problems were illuminated by the 529 furor. Veteran tax scholar Howard Gleckman noted sadly that the demise of Obama’s plan “reflected the lack of serious interest in reform by most lawmakers today.”6 I think it reflected something much worse.


pages: 655 words: 156,367

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

More and more of them had turned to political organizing, mobilizing to fight municipal budget cuts, to purge excessive money from politics, to relieve millions of young people from the crushing burden of student debt, and to seek ways to reimpose regulation on financial markets. Organizers from among the militants in their ranks met in New York in August to design an action and devise a slogan by which they would be known. “We are the 99 percent” was the phrase they embraced. In making this declaration, they were announcing their readiness to take their stand against the wealthy 1 percent. The widening economic inequality of American life, the architects of this slogan charged, had reached grotesque proportions. It had to be stopped, and then reversed.55 Many rallying to the “99 percent” slogan were new to politics.

Frequently members of the small police detail dispatched to the scene joined in. Impromptu musical jamming and drum sessions were common. The mood was both serious and festive.57 In a nation that, during its neoliberal heyday, had decried “class warfare”—pitting one class against another—the slogan “We are the 99 percent” proved surprisingly appealing. Some of that appeal had to do with the slogan’s anodyne nature: Virtually every American could claim membership in the 99 percent and thus escape the censure of being part of the despised 1 percent. But part of the slogan’s appeal worked in just the opposite way.


pages: 223 words: 58,732

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

Orbán now boasts that Hungary is an ‘illiberal democracy’. In his masterful survey of populism, Jan-Werner Müller takes up cudgels against those who argue populism is democratic. A true populist is not just opposed to the elites, he is also an enemy of pluralism. Without a plural society democracy loses its foundation. The populist never says ‘We are the 99 per cent,’ as Occupy Wall Street did during its Zuccotti Park protests. The populist claims to speak exclusively for the 100 per cent. Only they can know the identity of the true people. The Finnish populists began life as the True Finns. Today they are simply the Finns. The change of name is a measure of their success.


Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression by Geoff Cox, Alex McLean

4chan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, bash_history, bitcoin, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, finite state, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Conference 1984, Ian Bogost, Jacques de Vaucanson, language acquisition, Larry Wall, late capitalism, means of production, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, power law, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Slavoj Žižek, social software, social web, software studies, speech recognition, SQL injection, stem cell, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, The Nature of the Firm, Turing machine, Turing test, Vilfredo Pareto, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

We are Legion.”8 Most recently (since 17 September 2011), the Occupy Wall 70 Chapter 3 Street movement, with its rapid spread to other parts of the world, also seems apposite in its reappropriation of common space in places where financial power is centered (squatting its symbolic sites, to express indignation about the handling of the financial crisis since 2008).9 Adopting the “#Occupy” hashtag,10 the wider Occupy movement is described in terms that embody publicness in a wayward culture of financial calculation and social inequality: “We are the 99%.”11 Perhaps it can be claimed that the concept of publicness has itself been occupied in these recent events. Both examples serve to underscore Arendt’s view that the political realm necessarily arises out of acting together, as a plurality of unique individuals, in “the sharing of words and deeds.”12 It is collective activity that relies on the infinite capacity to speak freely and act in public, and this is what constitutes publicness in her terms.


pages: 580 words: 168,476

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, declining real wages, deskilling, electricity market, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Flash crash, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jobless men, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, lone genius, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, obamacare, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, Phillips curve, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

It was the banks. And it is the bankers who have gone, almost to a person, free. If no one is accountable, if no individual can be blamed for what has happened, it means that the problem lies in the economic and political system. From social cohesion to class warfare The slogan “we are the 99 percent” may have marked an important turning point in the debate about inequality in the United States. Americans have always shied away from class analysis; America, we liked to believe, is a middle-class country, and that belief helps bind us together. There should be no divisions between the upper and the lower classes, between the bourgeoisie and the workers.8 But if by a class-based society we mean one in which the prospects of those at the bottom to move up are low, America may have become even more class-based than old Europe, and our divisions have now become even greater than those there.9 Those in the 99 percent are continuing with the “we’re all middle class” tradition, with one slight modification: they recognize that we’re actually not all moving up together.

They are an expression of frustration with the political system and even, in those countries where there are elections, with the electoral process. They sound an alarm. In some ways the protesters have already accomplished a great deal: think tanks, government agencies, and the media have confirmed their allegations, the failures not just of the market system but of the high and unjustifiable level of inequality. The expression “we are the 99 percent” has entered into popular consciousness. No one can be sure where the movements will lead. But of this we can be sure: these young protesters have already altered public discourse and the consciousness of ordinary citizens and politicians alike. CONCLUDING COMMENTS In the weeks following the protest movements in Tunisia and Egypt, I wrote (in an early draft of my Vanity Fair article), As we gaze out at the popular fervor in the streets, one question to ask ourselves is this: when will it come to America?


pages: 598 words: 172,137

Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, business process, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial cluster, informal economy, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Occupy movement, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, Ted Nordhaus, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Vanguard fund, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

They gave voice to a populist protest against concentrated power and wealth in America, and much of the public responded positively to their message. In a few short weeks, the Occupy movement, inchoate as it was, not only changed the public dialogue on economic issues, but implanted in America’s political lexicon a vivid, Twitter-easy slogan—“We are the 99 percent”—opposing the richest 1 percent—a slogan that frames a central issue for election-year politics and policy makers in Washington. But lasting change in America will require a broader movement that is more deeply rooted, better organized, and more politically clear about a short list of policy goals.

Plants,” The Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2012. 46 “The American people themselves” Gardner, “American Experiment.” 47 More than half “Tea Party House Members Even Wealthier than Other GOP Lawmakers,” Center for Responsive Politics, January 4, 2012, http://​www.​opensecrets.​org/​news/​2012/​01/​tea-​party-​house-​members-​wealthy-​gop.​html. 48 “We are the 99 percent” Brian Stelter, “Camps Are Cleared but ’99 Percent’ Still Occupies the Lexicon,” The New York Times, November 30, 2011. 49 “Powerful thrust of energy” Gardner, “American Experiment.” PART 1: POWER SHIFT 1 Powell’s personal manner Linda Greenhouse, “Lewis Powell, Crucial Centrist Justice, Dies at 90,” The New York Times, August 26, 1998.


pages: 541 words: 173,676

Generations: the Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future by Jean M. Twenge

1960s counterculture, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, critical race theory, David Brooks, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McJob, meta-analysis, microaggression, Neil Armstrong, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ralph Nader, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, superstar cities, tech baron, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, TikTok, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

It was the biggest financial crisis the country had faced since the Great Depression of the 1930s, earning it the label the Great Recession. Many Americans were angry that Wall Street firms were bailed out when regular people received little help. These feelings culminated in Occupy Wall Street, a protest that pitched tents in Zuccotti Park in the New York Financial District beginning in September 2011. The protest’s slogan, “We are the 99%,” referred to the wealth gap between the richest 1% of the population and the other 99%, a measure of income inequality that had increased sharply since the 1970s. On November 15, the New York City police evicted the protestors from the park, bringing an end to the protest. Although the action itself was over, the issues Occupy highlighted shaped a generation of progressive activists.

On Tumblr and other sites, young people posted pictures of themselves holding handwritten notes about their dire financial straits. “There was no single objective but hundreds, or none, depending on whom you asked,” wrote Millennial Charlotte Alter. Still, Alter says, Occupy “gave language to a vague feeling that the vast majority of hardworking Americans were being screwed by a greedy elite: ‘We are the 99%’ would become the rallying cry of the many against the few.” Without the Occupy protest, Alter argues, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders would not have run for president, and Millennial U.S. representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (known as AOC) would probably not be in Congress. Ocasio-Cortez (b. 1989), first elected in 2018, was a walking object lesson in how to use social media the Millennial way, letting her followers in on her new experiences with a conspiratorial style.


pages: 228 words: 68,880

Revolting!: How the Establishment Are Undermining Democracy and What They're Afraid Of by Mick Hume

anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, colonial rule, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Jeremy Corbyn, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, open borders, plutocrats, post-truth, public intellectual, Slavoj Žižek, the scientific method, We are the 99%, World Values Survey

The mythical democratic subject ‘formed in the space between’ the local and the global seems to be floating around the globe (or at least the World Wide Web) adrift from notions of accountability and responsibility. Thus they can assume the ‘democratic’ right to speak on behalf of the global masses, without any need to ask those people what they might think or want. The famous slogan of the Occupy movements that camped out in various Western cities asserted, ‘We are the 99 per cent!’ A bold claim from protests that did not even number anywhere near 1 per cent. These ‘new democratic subjects’ have redefined democracy to mean staging media-oriented protests ‘on behalf of’ the passive populace, whether the people want it or not. They are speaking for a ‘new global civic society’ that exists in their imagination and web forums rather than on the streets.


Exploring Everyday Things with R and Ruby by Sau Sheong Chang

Alfred Russel Wallace, bioinformatics, business process, butterfly effect, cloud computing, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, data science, Debian, duck typing, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Gini coefficient, income inequality, invisible hand, p-value, price stability, Ruby on Rails, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, text mining, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, We are the 99%, web application, wikimedia commons

Lorenz curves showing inequality over time As expected, inequality increases over time—that is, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This is a simple simulation, so how does it reflect the real world? One of the major catchphrases in the “Occupy Wall Street” protest movement that started in 2011 is “We are the 99%,” which refers to the unequal distribution of wealth in America. The protesters have also accused Wall Street and corporations of risky lending practices that eventually caused the economic crisis of 2008, and have protested against corporate money in politics. These claims are not without merit.


pages: 267 words: 71,123

End This Depression Now! by Paul Krugman

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price stability, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Upton Sinclair, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, working poor, Works Progress Administration

High school teachers generally have both college and postgraduate degrees; they have not, to put it mildly, seen the kinds of income gains that hedge fund managers have experienced. Remember, again, how twenty-five fund managers made three times as much money as the eighty thousand New York City schoolteachers. The Occupy Wall Street movement rallied around a slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” which got much closer to the truth than the usual establishment talk about education and skill differentials. And it’s not just radicals who are saying this. Last fall the painstakingly nonpartisan, ultra-respectable Congressional Budget Office (CBO) put out a report detailing the rise in inequality between 1979 and 2007; it found that Americans in the 80th to 99th percentiles—that is, Bernanke’s top 20 percent, minus OWS’s 1 percent—had seen an income rise of 65 percent over that period.


pages: 317 words: 71,776

Inequality and the 1% by Danny Dorling

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, David Attenborough, David Graeber, delayed gratification, Dominic Cummings, double helix, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, family office, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, land value tax, Leo Hollis, Londongrad, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, mega-rich, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Russell Brand, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor

It may even be one of the best measures of inequality to consider in terms of how simple a target it may be for effective social policy.12 Economists have measured the fortunes of the best-off 1 per cent for decades. Only recently have political activists, campaigners, and even those anarchists who most distrust economists become as interested in these statistics. In 2011 David Graeber was credited with coining the phrase ‘We are the 99 per cent’, and so made the best-off 1 per cent the object of opposition. And with that phrase came what appeared to be new home truths. For example, for the 99 per cent, as Graeber explains, for most people ‘the fear of losing your job is far greater than the hope of finding a truly fulfilling one’.13 However, not all of the 99 per cent are unfulfilled, and many of the 1 per cent undertake work they find dull just to remain in that income bracket – though their income often means that in the rest of life they have choices that others can only dream of, other than the choice to be normal.


pages: 232 words: 70,361

The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay by Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cross-border payments, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, government statistician, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, labor-force participation, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, patent troll, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Steve Jobs, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, very high income, We are the 99%

With an average income of $220,000 and everything that goes with it—spacious suburban houses, expensive private schools for their children, well-funded pensions, and good health insurance—they are not struggling. But as a group they do not have much in common with the 1% (the 2.4 million richest Americans), whose members make $1.5 million in income a year on average. THE GAINS OF THE 1%: AS LARGE AS THE LOSSES OF THE BOTTOM 50% Since the emergence of the slogan “We are the 99%,” the public has become familiar with the divergence between the fortunes of the rich and those of the rest of society. But the idea bears repeating, because it reflects a fundamental truth about the American economy: over the last few decades, income has skyrocketed for those at the very top of the income distribution, and nowhere else.


pages: 215 words: 69,370

Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism by Rick Wartzman

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, basic income, Bernie Sanders, call centre, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Marc Benioff, old-boy network, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, shareholder value, supply-chain management, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

The Washington Post called it “a protest movement without clear demands.” But on this October day, there was nothing amorphous about what one group who had come to the park was trying to accomplish: they wanted Walmart to raise workers’ wages. “We’re here today to let the people at Occupy Wall Street know that Walmart’s associates stand with them; we are the 99 percent,” said Girshriela Green, who had gone to work at the company in 2009 as a part-timer in the Crenshaw neighborhood of Los Angeles. After several raises and a promotion to manager of the health and beauty department, she had seen her pay climb—but not by much. After starting at $8.20 an hour, Green had reached $9.80 before hurting her arm on the job, an injury that she blamed on having to manually haul 100 heavy boxes each day because of understaffing at her store.


pages: 662 words: 180,546

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

When not openly appealing to a lost world, like the “Take Back the American Dream” motif, they would propose “reforms” dating back to the 1980s, such as the Tobin tax on financial transactions, or a “fairness doctrine” for political ads, or an ineffectual public financing scheme for election campaigns. Mostly in the heat of Occupy, disputations over the crisis and financial sector were dominated by backward-looking ambitions and nostalgia for a happier and more prosperous time. Slogans like “We are the 99%” seemed to be calculated so as to be overly inclusive, confusing expansiveness with democracy, and therefore ineffectual. But even those wistful recollections were selective. The Occupiers were disdainful of close ties to trade unions, only to witness their own dreams of a General Strike fizzle in May 2012.

Likewise, since no one will ever staunch the roiling financialization of the modern economy, we might as well concoct even more new “financial instruments” and baroque trading procedures to make people feel a bit more that the market is really on their side. Some wet blankets such as Nouriel Roubini, Simon Johnson, and Richard Bookstaber may denounce certain aspects of securitization; but they just don’t understand: The Occupy Wall Street and Occupy London people say “We are the 99%.” There’s an increasing concern with unequal distribution of wealth, and finance is perceived as the villain in all of this. But I’m thinking it can’t be the villain; finance is a technology that can, if it’s properly applied, help reduce inequality if it’s applied to everyone. So I think that people who are in finance today have a moral obligation to help advance the trend toward democratisation of finance.48 So how will more financial engineering help us out of the hole left by the global crisis?


pages: 279 words: 76,796

The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives by Lisa Servon

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, do well by doing good, employer provided health coverage, financial exclusion, financial independence, financial innovation, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, Occupy movement, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, precariat, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, We are the 99%, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

Those benefits have been eroded, leaving individuals to cope with the unexpected and unfortunate events that happen to all of us. As Jacob Hacker, author of The Great Risk Shift, argues, “More and more economic risk has been offloaded by government and corporations onto the increasingly fragile balance sheets of workers and their families.” Rising inequality also plays a role. The Occupy movement, with its slogan “We are the 99 percent,” drew attention to this inequality in the wake of the financial crisis. Worldwide, people took to the streets to protest corporate greed and broken social contracts. The New York City incarnation of the movement, Occupy Wall Street, placed the financial sector at the center of the problem.


pages: 206 words: 9,776

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey

Alan Greenspan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, creative destruction, David Graeber, deindustrialization, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Murray Bookchin, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, precariat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, special economic zone, the built environment, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, urban planning, We are the 99%, William Langewiesche, Works Progress Administration

It says: "We the people are determined to take back our country from the moneyed powers that currently run it. Our aim is to prove Warren Buffett wrong. His class, the rich, shall no longer rule unchallenged nor automatically inherit the earth. Nor is his class, the rich, always destined to win:' It says: "We are the 99 p ercent. We have the majority and this majority can, must and shall prevail. Since all other channels of expression are closed to us by money power, we have no other option except to occupy the parks, squares and streets of our cities until our opinions are heard and our needs attended to:' To succeed, the movement has to reach out to the 99 percent.


pages: 285 words: 86,174

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Chris Hayes

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, carried interest, circulation of elites, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kenneth Arrow, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

To recover from the damage inflicted by the Crisis of Authority, we will be forced to reconstruct and reinvent our politics, a process that has, in a sense, already begun. Andrew Smith, an organizer with Occupy Wall Street, told me one fall evening in 2011 that the movement is not “Left or right, but up or down.” Amid drums and whoops and chants of “We! Are! The 99 percent!” he leaned in and said, “I realize that’s scary for some people.” Beyond left and right isn’t just a motto. Those most devoted to the deepest kinds of structural reform of the system are insistent that they do not fall along the traditional left-right axis. Just as elite failure claims a seemingly unrelated number of victims—the Palm Beach retiree bankrupted by Bernie Madoff and the child left homeless after his mother’s home was foreclosed—so, too, will you find that among those clued in to elite failure, left/right distinctions are less salient than those between what I call insurrectionists and institutionalists.


pages: 269 words: 83,307

Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits by Kevin Roose

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Carl Icahn, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, East Village, eat what you kill, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, fixed income, forward guidance, glass ceiling, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, hedonic treadmill, information security, Jane Street, jitney, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Michael Milken, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, plutocrats, proprietary trading, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tail risk, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, two and twenty, urban planning, We are the 99%, work culture , young professional

Over the next few months, of course, Occupy Wall Street would grow from a park gathering into a global protest movement whose reach extended far beyond New York. Within a month, the Zuccotti Park protest had spawned satellite protests in every major American metropolis, and international cities as far-flung as Sydney, Tokyo, and Davos, Switzerland. Occupy’s galvanizing slogan—“We are the 99 percent”—became an international cultural meme, and for weeks, the movement garnered front-page news coverage and made Wall Street bankers very nervous. “I just hope they don’t bomb us,” one Goldman Sachs analyst told me, half-seriously. “We’re the easiest target, if you think about it.” Many of the older, senior-level financiers I spoke to in the following weeks either ignored Occupy, pooh-poohed its aims as too unspecific and vague, or dismissed it as a group of drug-addled dropouts and vagrants who had nothing better to do with their time.


pages: 239 words: 80,319

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Rubin, benefit corporation, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Chris Wanstrath, citation needed, cloud computing, context collapse, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, decentralized internet, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, eternal september, fake news, feminist movement, Firefox, gentrification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, green new deal, helicopter parent, holacracy, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julie Ann Horvath, Kim Stanley Robinson, l'esprit de l'escalier, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, QAnon, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing complete, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, web application, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, you are the product

Reaction images started as a trend on Tumblr, a platform where scrapbooks became an interactive experience. In the beginning, Tumblr was general, like a blog but faster. The Tumblr browser extension could quickly highlight and post text and images from elsewhere on the web. It was a platform for political commentary and personal diary-like entries at first. Occupy Wall Street even had a Tumblr, “We are the 99%,” that was its online focal point, where activists shared their faces and their stories of financial hardship. But writing original text and uploading original images felt slow, too slow for this particular platform, so capture and collage became a more common way of communicating on it. The perspective was also different from blogging in its thematic adherence.


Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen by James Suzman

access to a mobile phone, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, clean water, discovery of the americas, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, full employment, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, means of production, Occupy movement, open borders, out of africa, post-work, quantitative easing, rewilding, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, We are the 99%

Interviews with “occupiers” yielded contradictory, speculative, and sometimes bewildering responses expressing a general dissatisfaction with the world and the urge to “eat the rich.” But this was because the Occupy movement defined itself by standing against many things while standing for nothing in particular. In the end, this ensemble of discordant voices found episodic moments of harmony around the rallying call of “We are the 99 percent!”—a slogan that captured one thing they could all agree on: they were all angry about what they saw to be rampant material and social inequality. What was particularly striking about the Occupy movement’s focus on inequality was that few of the occupiers were particularly preoccupied with poverty in any absolute sense.


pages: 684 words: 212,486

Hunger: The Oldest Problem by Martin Caparros

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, commoditize, David Graeber, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index fund, invention of agriculture, Jeff Bezos, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, plutocrats, profit maximization, Slavoj Žižek, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, Tobin tax, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%

Stiglitz ends the article with a warning: “The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.”6 The slogan spread quickly. In a few days, many spoke about the 99 and the 1 percent: politicians, journalists, advertisers, people. “We are the 99 percent,” became the battle cry. (In the United States, 10 percent of the population controls 76 percent of the national wealth, but what counted at that moment was that 1 percent.)7 Certainties were established. Suddenly the issue of inequality became a spot of common ground. The notion of inequality was established in relation to those who had accumulated too much.

In the same way, the enemy of that new and unlikely club of the rich and the poor, the marginal and the super-integrated, the oppressors and the oppressed that this 99 percent slogan proposed, was that 1 percent, the ones who’ve gone over the top. They are so grotesque, so excessive, that it is possible to assert that everybody else has something in common. (Do the people in the United States who chant “We are the 99 percent” realize that they, all together, are more or less the 1 percent of the world?) The 99 percent slogan brings up the subject of extreme wealth, not that of wealth, property, ways of appropriating wealth. (Lately, it seems that all discussions stop at the door of private property: it’s the non plus ultra of these times, the threshold one cannot cross.


pages: 363 words: 92,422

A Fine Mess by T. R. Reid

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, game design, Gini coefficient, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial robot, land value tax, loss aversion, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, Tesla Model S, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

Census data showed that median income for the average American family actually fell by 8.6% in the first fourteen years of the twenty-first century, while a lucky few at the very top were taking in staggering amounts of money.1 Economists had been tracking the imbalance of wealth in the United States and other advanced democracies for several years; indeed, Thomas Piketty was one of the pioneers of this line of research. Inequality as a political issue caught the public’s attention in the summer of 2011, when a ragtag group of protesters in New York City set up tents in a small park not far from the financial district and declared themselves the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. “We Are the 99%,” their banner read; the protesters loudly declared that 99% of Americans were getting the shaft because of the economic and political clout of the richest 1%. Almost overnight, similar encampments with similar banners sprang up in city parks around the country and overseas; by mid-October, the Washington Post tallied more than nine hundred Occupy gatherings in eighty different nations.


pages: 355 words: 92,571

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets by John Plender

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, diversification, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Golden arches theory, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, money market fund, moral hazard, moveable type in China, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Indeed, a recent paper from the IMF – not generally regarded as a left-wing body – refers to the tentative consensus in the literature that inequality can undermine progress in health and education, cause investment-reducing political and economic instability, and undercut the social consensus required to adjust in the face of shocks, and thus that it tends to reduce the pace and durability of growth.215 And it has undoubtedly contributed to anti-business sentiment. Poll evidence suggests that an erosion of trust in business reflects ordinary people’s inability to see any moral connection between effort and reward at the top end of industry and commerce.216 That concern was evident in the Occupy Wall Street movement, with its slogan ‘we are the 99 per cent’, together with other, similar protest movements around the world. The debate on how to share the spoils of the system also gives rise to questions at the level of the company. In the Anglosphere, the shareholder-capitalist is seen as the key stakeholder in the system, enjoying the residual right to corporate profits after the claims of labour and all other creditors have been met.


pages: 357 words: 95,986

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

The assortment of slogans and causes associated with Occupy testifies to an explosion of suppressed anger and a proliferation of political demands that otherwise went unheard. Even among those who did not directly participate in the occupations, Occupy provided a platform for the excluded in websites such as the ‘We are the 99 Percent’ Tumblr, with a chorus of voices protesting against economic immiseration and social exclusion.24 Beyond any direct political result, the opportunity for the frustrations of the excluded to be publicly aired was inspiring and empowering for many. Occupy also worked to disrupt the ordinary lives of both participants and observers, and allowed people to participate together in a shared political project.


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

There are personal grievances: lost jobs, lack of unemployment benefits, pension cuts, mortgage foreclosures, homelessness, college fees, or student loans. But there are also wider issues: the widening economic and social gap, the financialization of the economy, allocation of the responsibility and burden of the GFC, disenfranchisement of voters, and inequality. The Guy Fawkes mask and the “We are the 99 percent” chant, first heard in New York's Zuccotti Park, are emblems of a moral protest. The 1 percent saw it as violent revolution. An Occupy poster retorted: “They don't call it class warfare until we fight back.” The 1 percent argue that their wealth is the result of hard work. People are not of equal ability, they claim.


pages: 318 words: 91,957

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 737 MAX, call centre, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, disinformation, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fulfillment center, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, inventory management, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operational security, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, remote working, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Ballmer, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, WeWork, women in the workforce

And as the true impunity of those responsible came into focus—no one who had a major hand in causing the crisis faced real consequences—that outrage spilled onto the streets. Egged on by the anti-capitalist magazine Adbusters, a group of protesters descended on Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan in September 2011, and the Occupy Wall Street movement was born. With the slogan “We are the 99 percent,” one protest spawned another, and what started in New York spread to Oakland, London, and dozens of other cities around the world. People were outraged that wages were so low and employment seemed so tenuous for so many. They were furious that corporations got bailed out, and that none of the parties responsible for the financial crisis had been held accountable.


pages: 379 words: 99,340

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Ayatollah Khomeini, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Burning Man, business cycle, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, David Graeber, death of newspapers, disinformation, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, job-hopping, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Port of Oakland, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skype, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, too big to fail, traveling salesman, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional

They organized on the web so they could occupy a physical space, and they occupied a physical space so they could talk about it online. More completely than the other protesters of 2011, they were creatures of the Fifth Wave, able to extend their reach digitally beyond their small numbers. The We Are the 99 Percent campaign on Tumblr, in which ordinary people told their stories of victimization on a single sheet of paper, had a tremendous impact on liberal commentators and the news media in general. Every Occupy site had an elaborate Facebook page. Every violent act by a cop trying to dislodge a young Occupier was caught on mobile phone video and posted online.


pages: 317 words: 101,475

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones

Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, deindustrialization, Etonian, facts on the ground, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, meritocracy, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, pension reform, place-making, plutocrats, post-war consensus, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, rising living standards, social distancing, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

They were, in part, inspired by the Spanish indignados (outraged) who had occupied Madrid's main square the previous May in protest at the Spanish government's response to the banking crisis; they, in tum, had followed the example of Egyptian revolutionaries who had taken Cairo's Tahrir Square. The New York protests spawned a global 'Occupy' movement, as similar camps were set up in hundreds of cities across the globe-including London, where tents were erected outside St Paul's Cathedral. The key slogan of the Occupy movement, 'We are the 99 per cent', reflected that the interests of the overwhelming majority of people conflicted with those of the elite 1 per cent at the top. It may not have been an accurate figure, but that wasn't the point: the slogan tapped into a deep sense of injustice that had taken root since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008.


pages: 357 words: 99,684

Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions by Paul Mason

anti-globalists, back-to-the-land, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, Chekhov's gun, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, disinformation, do-ocracy, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, informal economy, land tenure, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, Occupy movement, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rising living standards, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, union organizing, We are the 99%, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, young professional

RIM, the maker of Blackberry, quickly pledged to do what it could to unsecure the data. However, in response to increased surveillance and repression, activists have evolved new uses for social media. Tumblr emerged as the platform of choice of the Occupy movement in America after it hosted the viral ‘We are the 99%’ blog. The blog, and the ‘99%’ meme it created, form a case study in the mass dissemination of ideas possible with social media. The slogan itself originated at a general assembly in New York’s Zuccotti Park in August: a blogger posted an appeal for posed photographs with one-line summaries of their subject’s economic problems.


pages: 364 words: 99,613

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class by Jeff Faux

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, back-to-the-land, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disruptive innovation, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, old-boy network, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Solyndra, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working poor, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, you are the product

Within a year the wistful political paralysis of the Jon Stewart rally gave way to the angry confrontations of Occupy Wall Street (OWS). In mid-September 2011, a loose network of largely young activists—inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East and the large protests against austerity in Europe—took over Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan in the geographic heart of the financial plutocracy. Their slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” referred to the doubling of the share of income going to the richest 1 percent of Americans since 1979. From the encampment emerged daily demonstrations, teach-ins, and efforts to engage employees going to work at the banks and investment houses. The movement quickly spread to hundreds of other cities.


pages: 349 words: 98,868

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

But they have taken on a fresh sense of purpose since the global financial crisis of 2007–9, especially on the left. The Occupy movement that emerged in 2011 to protest against the banks made public assembly its central political purpose, and took the cold, scientific language of statistics and turned it into a mobilizing identity with the famous slogan “we are the 99%.” Left-wing leaders, such as Alexis Tsipras in Greece, Pablo Iglesias in Spain and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, have placed renewed political emphasis on the ability to bring large numbers of people together in public spaces. Here too, the size of rallies stirs a range of emotions from both supporters and opponents: exuberance, scorn, empathy, misinformation, hope, and resentment.


pages: 393 words: 91,257

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the proletarianization of the middle class resulted in widespread support for Communism, Fascism, and National Socialism.42 Today, as in Europe before World War II, people on both right and left often blame financial institutions for their precarious situation.43 Anger at the financial services sector gave rise to the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City and the many spinoff Occupy protests in 2011–12. Marching under the slogan “We are the 99 percent,” protesters around the world decried the heavy concentration of wealth in a few hands. Alienation from the political mainstream today is resulting in strong support for far-left parties and candidates among youth in various high-income countries.44 In France’s presidential election of 2017, the former Trotskyite Jean-Luc Mélenchon won the under-24 vote, beating the more youthful Emmanuel Macron by almost two to one among that age group.45 In the United Kingdom, the Labour Party under the neo-Marxist Jeremy Corbyn in 2018 won more than 60 percent of the under-40 vote, while the Conservatives got just 23 percent.46 He won the youth vote similarly in 2020, even amidst a crushing electoral defeat.


pages: 308 words: 97,480

The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, disinformation, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, false flag, gentrification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, intentional community, Jeffrey Epstein, lockdown, Occupy movement, operation paperclip, Parler "social media", prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, sensible shoes, social distancing, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

There were at least 1,000 occupations, a gritty spiral jetty of anarchist punks and construction workers, cooks and nannies and librarians—lots of librarians—and Teamsters and priests and immigrants, “legal” and otherwise. Some occupations drew tens of thousands, most a few hundred, some no more than one earnest soul on the side of the road with a sign that said we are the 99%. What did they want? They made no demands. They drove the press and even the politicians who might have been allies—“it expresses the frustrations the American people,” said President Obama—mad by refusing the very idea of demands. They met nightly in “general assemblies” to which you elected yourself simply by being there.


pages: 352 words: 107,280

Good Times, Bad Times: The Welfare Myth of Them and Us by John Hills

Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, credit crunch, Donald Trump, falling living standards, full employment, Gini coefficient, income inequality, income per capita, longitudinal study, meritocracy, mortgage debt, pension reform, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, unpaid internship, very high income, We are the 99%, working-age population, World Values Survey

Information from the World Top Incomes database, established by Tony Atkinson, Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, shows that the after tax incomes of the top 1 per cent in the UK doubled from 4.7 of the national total in 1979 to 9.5 per cent in 1996 and 12.6 per cent on the eve of the economic crisis in 2007.48 There was a change in definition between 1989 and 1990 (when independent taxation was brought in), but even excluding the change over that period, the overall increase in their share over that period – just under 7 percentage points – was enough to account for the gain of the whole top 10 per cent. In this sense, the slogan ‘We are the 99 per cent’ has some bite – it was the top 1 per cent whose share was increasing, while the shares of other groups lost ground or stood still. What has happened to the shares of the very top since 2007 is less clear, especially as top taxpayers adjusted which years they officially received their incomes in to avoid the ones when the top rate of Income Tax was 50 per cent.


pages: 440 words: 108,137

The Meritocracy Myth by Stephen J. McNamee

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, antiwork, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, failed state, fixed income, food desert, Gary Kildall, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, joint-stock company, junk bonds, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, occupational segregation, old-boy network, pink-collar, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, prediction markets, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Scientific racism, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, white flight, young professional

This was most evident with the rise of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. Starting in September 2011, protesters convened in Zuccotti Park located in the Wall Street financial district, drawing attention to economic inequality and specifically banks and investors that had triggered the recession. The OWS slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” referred to the top 1 percent of the population in which wealth is highly concentrated compared to everyone else. OWS groups sprung up in many other cities in the United States and around the world. The initial occupation of Zuccotti Park ended in December 2011 when the New York City Police forced occupiers to leave the park, presumably because of health and sanitation concerns.


pages: 385 words: 101,761

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

As Americans began to feel the effects of the Great Recession, it became clear that the economic benefits of the New Economy disproportionately went to a tiny elite, while the vast middle class saw immiseration and downward mobility. We witnessed an inequality gap that hadn’t been as wide since the 1920s and the Great Depression. The Occupy Wall Street movement, with its rallying cry “We are the 99 percent,” crystallized the sense that something needed to change. You knew something fundamental was about to change when both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street found a common enemy, publicly blaming “Crony Capitalism” for destroying the American Dream. Even while the New Economy was at its peak, alternative ways of thinking and doing had begun springing up around the nation.


pages: 419 words: 109,241

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

Focusing our attention on that richest fraction of society gives us a third approach to the issue, known as “top income inequality” or just “top inequality.” This measure has captured the imagination of protesters and public commentators in the last decade, with “The One Percent” becoming a well-known label and “We are the 99 Percent” the battle cry of the Occupy Movement. Their frustration is not without cause: the proportion of total income that goes to the 1 percent who earn the most, particularly in developed countries, has increased significantly. In the United States and the UK, that share has almost doubled over the last few decades.15 Figure 8.3 shows that much the same story is unfolding elsewhere.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Guy Standing, a British economist, even coined the term precariat, to point to “an emerging class, comprising the rapidly growing number of people facing lives of insecurity, moving in and out of jobs that give little meaning to their lives.”43 Seen from this perspective, it is no wonder that in 2011, a one-page call for action in an activist magazine led to one of the most supported American protest movements of this century. The page in AdBusters read, “17 September. Wall Street. Bring Tent.” Protestors did in fact show up in lower Manhattan on that day, they brought tents, and with that, Occupy Wall Street was born. Referencing the extreme inequality in America, the movement's rallying cry became “We are the 99 percent,” and the protestors decried the wealth, income, and power accumulated by the 1 percent richest individuals and corporations in America. As you can see from Figure 2.4, this dichotomy between the 1 percent and the rest of income earners was not imaginary. The same pattern exists in other parts of the world, and in some countries the outrage over these inequalities has erupted with equal force as it has in the English-speaking world.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Guy Standing, a British economist, even coined the term precariat, to point to “an emerging class, comprising the rapidly growing number of people facing lives of insecurity, moving in and out of jobs that give little meaning to their lives.”43 Seen from this perspective, it is no wonder that in 2011, a one-page call for action in an activist magazine led to one of the most supported American protest movements of this century. The page in AdBusters read, “17 September. Wall Street. Bring Tent.” Protestors did in fact show up in lower Manhattan on that day, they brought tents, and with that, Occupy Wall Street was born. Referencing the extreme inequality in America, the movement's rallying cry became “We are the 99 percent,” and the protestors decried the wealth, income, and power accumulated by the 1 percent richest individuals and corporations in America. As you can see from Figure 2.4, this dichotomy between the 1 percent and the rest of income earners was not imaginary. The same pattern exists in other parts of the world, and in some countries the outrage over these inequalities has erupted with equal force as it has in the English-speaking world.


pages: 360 words: 113,429

Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence by Rachel Sherman

American ideology, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, gig economy, high net worth, income inequality, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, mental accounting, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, plutocrats, precariat, school choice, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

It is tempting to think of wealthy people as only the ones we see talked about in the media. But these representations tend to feature the super-wealthy, those in the top .1 percent or above. We might, instead, choose the top 1 percent, a definition often used in scholarly analysis and popularized by Occupy. The political focus on this category, through the slogan “We are the 99%,” brought attention to inequality in a powerful way. But it also homogenized the 99 percent rather than acknowledging differences between, say, the top 2 percent and the bottom 50 percent.49 Noting some of these issues, Lauren Rivera has advocated defining elites as the top 20 percent because of this group’s educational advantages.50 I chose to start my study by seeking participants with annual household incomes of $250,000, which is in the top 5 percent in New York City.51 I also decided to look for people in their thirties and forties who had children, as I believed that such people would be especially likely to be making important lifestyle decisions such as buying homes and choosing schools.


pages: 437 words: 113,173

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

“Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey: Employment-Population Ratio.” United States Department of Labor. Retrieved from data.bls.gov. Disillusioned by the “recovery” that wasn’t (see Figure 8-1), in September 2011, several hundred people came together under the slogan “We are the 99%” and occupied New York City’s Zuccotti Park, near Wall Street, in protest. What in another time and place might have remained an obscure act of civil disobedience instead found a discouraged global public willing to join in. Within a month, the Occupy movement had spread to over 950 cities in 82 countries across five continents.


pages: 453 words: 117,893

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

However, the group of around 3,000 people simply gathered instead outside nearby St Paul’s Cathedral, where an indefinite camp was established. A month earlier a similar encampment had been set up in New York’s Wall Street, and soon protests of different sizes emerged in cities around the world. Occupy’s slogan, ‘We are the 99 per cent’, referred to the high proportion of global wealth accounted for by the top 1 per cent of the distribution. They reflected the widespread public anger in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis. The protesters called for financial reform, a fairer distribution of income and wealth and a rejection of austerity.


pages: 374 words: 113,126

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

However, the group of around 3,000 people simply gathered instead outside nearby St Paul’s Cathedral, where an indefinite camp was established. A month earlier a similar encampment had been set up in New York’s Wall Street, and soon protests of different sizes emerged in cities around the world. Occupy’s slogan, ‘We are the 99 per cent’, referred to the high proportion of global wealth accounted for by the top 1 per cent of the distribution. They reflected the widespread public anger in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis. The protesters called for financial reform, a fairer distribution of income and wealth and a rejection of austerity.


pages: 401 words: 112,784

Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump by Tom Clark, Anthony Heath

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, British Empire, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, full employment, Gini coefficient, Greenspan put, growth hacking, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, income inequality, interest rate swap, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, unconventional monetary instruments, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

Disabled ‘Stephanie’ in Luton said: ‘We just feel like we are beggars, sitting there with our hands out.’ Few human beings in that frame of mind will have the confidence to round on their accusers; instead the instinct is to acquit oneself by finding someone else to point the finger at. ♦♦♦ ‘We are the 99%’ is the great slogan of the Occupy protesters. It is a slogan justified by reference to the income distribution statistics, and one that sounds as if it ought to be able to rally a crushing electoral majority. But the numerical prevalence of the squeezed majority is, in fact, a weakness as well as a strength – identities within any ‘group’ that claims to cover anything like 99% of people are likely to be more defined by divisions than anything else.49 Yes, ‘the 1%’ has grabbed the lion's share of growth over many years – and everyone else has a legitimate grievance about that.


pages: 461 words: 125,845

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers by Andy Greenberg

air gap, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Burning Man, Chelsea Manning, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disinformation, domain-specific language, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, hive mind, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mondo 2000, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, operational security, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Ralph Nader, real-name policy, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, SQL injection, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Teledyne, three-masted sailing ship, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Zimmermann PGP

CONCLUSION THE MACHINE In New York’s Zuccotti Park, the epicenter of a global anticapitalist and anticorruption movement that began in the fall of 2011 under the name Occupy Wall Street, protesters adopt the same tactics of angry, confrontational nonviolence that Birgitta Jónsdóttir used in the Icelandic Revolution of 2009, that Daniel Ellsberg and Phil Zimmermann used in their Cold War protests for nuclear disarmament, that John Young used in the Columbia University Occupation of 1968. They chant slogans, acquiesce to arrest without resistance, and carry signs: “We are the 99%,” “Robin Hood Was Right,” “Free Assange,” and “Free Bradley Manning.” And they also carry cell phones, almost all of which contain a video camera. Video clips that have emerged from the protests on websites like YouTube and LiveLeak include one of police pushing into crowds of demonstrators on the Brooklyn Bridge, grabbing protesters seemingly at random, and dragging them out to be arrested as the crowd chants, “The whole world is watching.”


pages: 433 words: 125,031

Brazillionaires: The Godfathers of Modern Brazil by Alex Cuadros

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, BRICs, buy the rumour, sell the news, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, family office, financial engineering, high net worth, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, NetJets, offshore financial centre, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, rent-seeking, risk/return, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, We are the 99%, William Langewiesche

When Bloomberg started putting together a team of journalists to cover the ultra-rich, the timing was apt, if unintentionally so. It was the fall of 2011, and protesters had just set up tents in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, calling their movement Occupy Wall Street. They had a lot of messages, but the one that resonated was the simplest: We are the 99 percent. The movement divided America into the ninety-nine percent of people who took the brunt of the financial crash and the richest one percent—the bankers involved in the crash, especially—who seemed to suffer no consequences. The one percent, though, covered a lot of people. Most were professionals and managers who lacked much power on their own.


pages: 444 words: 130,646

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, British Empire, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, context collapse, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, gentrification, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of writing, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, loose coupling, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Streisand effect, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Almost every day brought new messages of support and solidarity and news of other occupations popping up around the country. Here was a popular protest, an emergent movement that addressed one of the most important fault lines developing in Western nations, the one between the super-rich and the rest of the population. It had a catchy slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” explicitly pitting the protesters against the richest 1 percent. The occupation was located at the heart of a media-rich environment. It should have been major news. But it was not. If it had not been for social media, where the occupation flourished as a topic through hastily set-up Facebook pages and Twitter accounts that shared news, pictures, videos from the protests, and even live-streaming of its general assemblies, the movement might have hit a wall because of lack of attention.


pages: 502 words: 128,126

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire by Danny Dorling, Sally Tomlinson

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, colonial rule, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Etonian, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, wealth creators

As Matthew Stewart, who has written widely on the origins and future of the USA, explains: As of 2016, it took $1.2 million in net worth to make it into the 9.9 per cent; $2.4 million to reach the group’s median; and $10 million to get into the top 0.9 per cent. (And if you’re not there yet, relax: Our club is open to people who are on the right track and have the right attitude.) ‘We are the 99 per cent’ sounds righteous, but it’s a slogan, not an analysis. The families at our end of the spectrum wouldn’t know what to do with a pitchfork. We are also mostly, but not entirely, white.85 Britain has been looking towards the wrong nation for guidance – the USA, a country whose rulers have largely hated immigrants for some time, despite hosting an economy that always required more labour, and despite now being made up almost entirely of the descendants of immigrants.


pages: 478 words: 149,810

We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency by Parmy Olson

4chan, Asperger Syndrome, bitcoin, call centre, Chelsea Manning, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, it's over 9,000, Julian Assange, lolcat, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, pirate software, side project, Skype, speech recognition, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day

The FBI said that they were “chopping off the head of LulzSec,” but by March of 2012, after LulzSec had been disbanded for more than nine months, other hacker cells were taking up the Antisec cause; in February of 2012 alone, supporters of Anonymous had taken credit for attacking the websites of the CIA, Interpol, Citigroup, and a string of banks in Brazil, among other targets. Then there was the growing international movement called “Occupy,” which emerged in September 2011 and saw tens of thousands take to the streets in major capitals to protest social and economic inequality, often using the slogan “We are the 99%.” Activist-style supporters of Anonymous largely showed their support for Occupy, promoting it on Twitter and blogs and wearing the V for Vendetta masks at protests. Police had arrested more than 6,800 people in connection with the Occupy movement as of April 2012, by which time it had gone into hiatus.


pages: 559 words: 169,094

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, citizen journalism, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, DeepMind, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, East Village, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, food desert, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, Larry Ellison, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shock, PalmPilot, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, smart grid, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, too big to fail, union organizing, uptick rule, urban planning, vertical integration, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, white picket fence, zero-sum game

Kevin knew about the sins of Wall Street, but the level of the protesters’ vitriol surprised him. If they wanted change, they’d have to appeal to the better angels of a banker’s nature. From lower Manhattan, the protean flame spread around the country and the world. Within weeks there were twenty-five, fifty, a hundred occupations. The movement’s slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” was simple and capacious enough to cover a multitude of discontents and desires. It became the name of a blog on Tumblr that collected a gallery of hundreds of faces in snapshots sent by readers, some obscured or half hidden by the anonymous autobiographical statement that each person wrote down on a piece of paper and held up for the camera.


Peggy Seeger by Jean R. Freedman

anti-communist, anti-work, antiwork, cotton gin, feminist movement, financial independence, glass ceiling, job satisfaction, Multics, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Skype, We are the 99%, Works Progress Administration, young professional

“Declaration of the Occupation of New York City,” September 29, 2011, http://www.nycga.net/resources/documents/declaration/, accessed June 30, 2016. 4. This line refers to economic divisions between the top 1 percent of the population and the remaining 99 percent. One of the rallying cries of the Occupy movements was, “We are the 99 percent.” 5. “The Anticapitalist Roadshow,” http://www.redmagic.co.uk/anticap/index.htm, accessed June 30, 2016. 6. Frankie Armstrong, email message to the author, December 8, 2012. 7. Peggy Seeger, email message to the author, September 3, 2014. 8. Peggy Seeger, email message to the author, August 15, 2012. 9.


pages: 641 words: 182,927

In Pursuit of Privilege: A History of New York City's Upper Class and the Making of a Metropolis by Clifton Hood

affirmative action, British Empire, Carl Icahn, coherent worldview, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, family office, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, jitney, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, P = NP, plutocrats, Ray Oldenburg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Scientific racism, selection bias, Steven Levy, streetcar suburb, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban planning, We are the 99%, white flight

Cultural values and social practices that had been new and fluid in the early 1970s had hardened, forming a cultural system that was becoming as inflexible as Victorianism had once been. The corporate elite was hardly immune to attack. In 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement arose in New York and in other cities in the United States and abroad, and its slogan “We Are the 99%” galvanized fears and anger that had been building since the 2008 financial crisis over the inequities of corporate capitalism and the mounting concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few in New York City and elsewhere. Two years later, Bill De Blasio won election as mayor of New York City in a landslide that represented a backlash against the administration of incumbent Mayor Michael R.


pages: 1,066 words: 273,703

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

In October 2013 two French economists, one working in California, the other back in Paris, published the latest release of a long-running project on American inequality.14 Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty were at this point not unknown. An earlier paper in which they mapped top incomes in the United States over the long run had yielded the “We are the 99 percent” slogan that the Occupy movement had used to such good effect.15 Nevertheless, the data they released in October 2013 were astonishing. From the latest round of tax releases they calculated that of the growth generated by the economic recovery since 2009, 95 percent had been monopolized by the top 1 percent.


pages: 935 words: 267,358

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, banks create money, Berlin Wall, book value, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, centre right, circulation of elites, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial intermediation, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, Honoré de Balzac, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index card, inflation targeting, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, meritocracy, Money creation, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, power law, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, twin studies, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, zero-sum game

To return for a moment to the Occupy Wall Street movement, what it shows is that the use of a common terminology, and in particular the concept of the “top centile,” though it may at first glance seem somewhat abstract, can be helpful in revealing the spectacular growth of inequality and may therefore serve as a useful tool for social interpretation and criticism. Even mass social movements can avail themselves of such a tool to develop unusual mobilizing themes, such as “We are the 99 percent!” This might seem surprising at first sight, until we remember that the title of the famous pamphlet that Abbé Sieyès published in January 1789 was “What Is the Third Estate?”8 I should also make it clear that the hierarchies (and therefore centiles and deciles) of income are not the same as those of wealth.