I'll sum it up: hard working people in the bottom half of the "top 1%" are not evil power-brokers but the most successful professionals. You have to look at the top 0.5 or top 0.1% (I'd argue that even 0.1% is generous) before engaging "the corridors of power", which consists of financial and real estate elites as well as contractors exploiting corrupt government officials. Is this news?
A more interesting exposition might be the ruse that exists because Americans conflate these two classes of rich. It has all sorts of pernicious cultural effects. American conservatism is founded on the false belief that the $5m/year bankers are merely scaled-up versions of the $400k/year neurosurgeon who has been working hard since he was 6... when in fact, they're totally different.
This is fairly important if one looks at where revolutions begin. They usually start from the high end from the middle class, among people who are "rich" but not especially powerful. The American colonists were very wealthy, but had no clout because they were 3000 miles away from those making the decisions. The French revolutionary thought leaders were wealthy salon denizens, although far from the court at Versailles, and therefore increasingly out-of-power as the clouds darkened over France. History describes such revolutionaries, radicals, and agitators as "middle class" in hindsight (they're our heroes, and the U.S. associates "middle class" reflexively with virtue) but these people did, in fact, come overwhelmingly from the richest ~5 percent. The American "Founding Fathers" were downright rich. Revolutionary agitation usually comes when hard-working, intelligent, and previously fortunate people become out of power and hit a ceiling, either because society is deeply stagnant or because they're actively being deprived of autonomy. Eventually, conflict between the small, closed, social-network-based "upper" elite and the larger, fluid, merit-based "upper-middle" elite reaches a boiling point. It was this way at the end of the 18th century in America and France, and it will very likely be this way in the major conflict of the first third of the 21st century. The danger is that the conservative American has been misled into believing that the more noble elite ("elitist liberal intellectuals") is the oppressor while the truly damaging elite is held up as the good one, as if there were any similarity between a $20m/year, fifth-generation-wealthy banker and "Joe the Plumber". There's not. But conservative Americans have been led to believe that bankers are hard-working people just like them while "intellectuals" are an elitist enemy oppressor. Culture is, in the U.S., slowly replacing race as the elite's favorite divide-and-conquer mechanism. American conservatism is a machine for driving a wedge between the people who are trying to save this society ("liberal intellectuals", although neither word should be pejorative) and the common people of the country they are trying to save.
No news in the OP. The world is run by a morally debased and increasingly incompetent oligarchy, heavily intertwined with the banking system and with about 40% of its membership in the U.S. upper class. That was only news in 2008 to people who weren't paying attention.
"The French revolutionary thought leaders were wealthy salon denizens, although far from the court at Versailles, and therefore increasingly out-of-power as the clouds darkened over France. History describes such revolutionaries, radicals, and agitators as "middle class" in hindsight (they're our heroes, and the U.S. associates "middle class" reflexively with virtue) but these people did, in fact, come overwhelmingly from the richest ~5 percent."
Actually, by the traditional definition, they were still middle class, as higher classes were defined by more than just money (royalty, political position, etc.)
Correct. Only in relatively recent times has the distinction "class" become solely delineated by income or wealth.
Wealth has always been a big part of it, but throughout much of human history, wealth didn't create class; class created wealth. Your access to the monarch or ruling body granted you certain monopolistic privileges and land, from which you derived enormous wealth. But the wealth was the byproduct of, and not the generator of, class. (In fact, many extremely wealthy people, such as successful merchants and traders, were nevertheless denied elite class status because their class ranking had been fixed at birth).
This equation was turned on its head to some extent by the industrial revolution. This was the first time in history when the wealth generated by industry and trade began to dwarf the wealth generated by land ownership and agriculture on a massive and undeniable scale -- thereby wrenching power from the nobles/landowners, and placing it in the hands of newly minted industrialists. But even in the following century, it took a long while for wealth and social class to become thoroughly decoupled, and then reassembled in a different way.
What's happening now in America is that we're once again returning to a system where parentage and class beget wealth, which fixes class, which then repeats with the next generation. There are always notable exceptions to the rule, and these exceptions are held up in support of the "American Dream." But they are very clearly the exceptions. (And, in a surprising many of those rags-to-riches stories, a closer examination of the events behind the narrative often reveals that the "rags" origins were exaggerrated to varying degrees).
American conservatism is a machine for driving a wedge between the people who are trying to save this society ("liberal intellectuals", although neither word should be pejorative) and the common people of the country they are trying to save.
Who are you including under the term "liberal intellectual"? Are you including folks like Martin Feldstein (Harvard), Larry Summers (ex Harvard), Robert Rubin (Harvard BoD) and Robert Schiller (Yale)? If so, I'd argue those academia-associated liberals are every bit part of the problem. Even further-to-the-left intellectuals like Krugman have their salaries mainly funded by donations from wealthy bankers, and they offered very little criticism of the financial sector before 2008.
Go to a dive bar in Western PA, ask the people there what they think about neurosurgeons and what they think about bankers. The American conservative base hates bankers.
It may be the case that, when it comes to financial industry reforms, there's not much light between the two major parties. But what light there is is probably most clearly represented by Elizabeth Warren and the consumer protection agency for which she advocated.
Yet as soon as they took over the House, the Republican party made it a point to immediately attack her and sink her chance to lead it. So while the conservative base hates bankers, they seem also to have been conditioned to reflexively hate any kind of realistic mechanism to regulate them even more.
Unfortunately, as much as they may hate bankers (or claim to, at any rate), they hate "government" and "regulation" even more -- because that's what their banker-funded politicians have reflexively drilled into their heads. So they'll rally against regulation of the banks even if they don't understand what it's for, or that the very bankers they claim to hate benefit from their votes.
No. But the sum-up is not what makes this article good. What makes it good are the details about where the wealth comes from and what the people in the various segments are actually doing.
I'll sum it up: hard working people in the bottom half of the "top 1%" are not evil power-brokers but the most successful professionals. You have to look at the top 0.5 or top 0.1% (I'd argue that even 0.1% is generous) before engaging "the corridors of power", which consists of financial and real estate elites as well as contractors exploiting corrupt government officials. Is this news?
A more interesting exposition might be the ruse that exists because Americans conflate these two classes of rich. It has all sorts of pernicious cultural effects. American conservatism is founded on the false belief that the $5m/year bankers are merely scaled-up versions of the $400k/year neurosurgeon who has been working hard since he was 6... when in fact, they're totally different.
This is fairly important if one looks at where revolutions begin. They usually start from the high end from the middle class, among people who are "rich" but not especially powerful. The American colonists were very wealthy, but had no clout because they were 3000 miles away from those making the decisions. The French revolutionary thought leaders were wealthy salon denizens, although far from the court at Versailles, and therefore increasingly out-of-power as the clouds darkened over France. History describes such revolutionaries, radicals, and agitators as "middle class" in hindsight (they're our heroes, and the U.S. associates "middle class" reflexively with virtue) but these people did, in fact, come overwhelmingly from the richest ~5 percent. The American "Founding Fathers" were downright rich. Revolutionary agitation usually comes when hard-working, intelligent, and previously fortunate people become out of power and hit a ceiling, either because society is deeply stagnant or because they're actively being deprived of autonomy. Eventually, conflict between the small, closed, social-network-based "upper" elite and the larger, fluid, merit-based "upper-middle" elite reaches a boiling point. It was this way at the end of the 18th century in America and France, and it will very likely be this way in the major conflict of the first third of the 21st century. The danger is that the conservative American has been misled into believing that the more noble elite ("elitist liberal intellectuals") is the oppressor while the truly damaging elite is held up as the good one, as if there were any similarity between a $20m/year, fifth-generation-wealthy banker and "Joe the Plumber". There's not. But conservative Americans have been led to believe that bankers are hard-working people just like them while "intellectuals" are an elitist enemy oppressor. Culture is, in the U.S., slowly replacing race as the elite's favorite divide-and-conquer mechanism. American conservatism is a machine for driving a wedge between the people who are trying to save this society ("liberal intellectuals", although neither word should be pejorative) and the common people of the country they are trying to save.
No news in the OP. The world is run by a morally debased and increasingly incompetent oligarchy, heavily intertwined with the banking system and with about 40% of its membership in the U.S. upper class. That was only news in 2008 to people who weren't paying attention.