Review
WENDY GEORGE
Plutocrats:
The Rise of the
New Global
Super-Rich
and the Fall of
Everyone Else
By Chrystia
Freeland
The Penguin
Press
336 pages
October 11, 2012
peter s. goodman
HUFFINGTON
09.23.12
the wrath of the populist mob
or the tax collector.
This loose social compact
endured more or less as the industrial revolution delivered a
Gilded Age. It lasted into the
20th century, as the masters of
industry grasped that their new
mass-produced wares — from
automobiles to kitchen appliances — needed no less than a
mass market, and that required
a prospering middle class.
But this traditional accommodation between the economic
classes is today all but inoperative. An emerging global elite is
increasingly intent on amassing
more than ever while writing
the rules to ensure they hang on
to as much as they can. This is
the fundamental takeaway from Chrystia Freeland’s important new book, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global
Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else.
Freeland, global editor-at-large for Reuters, argues
that the old order in which the rewards of capitalism
were distributed progressively through taxation and
lasting public works has been supplanted by a winnertakes-all marketplace, one that has driven economic inequality to alarming extremes. The ultimate haves — not
merely the 1 percent, but the .1 percent — have grown
so powerful that they threaten to capture the organs of
government, wielding authority in pursuit of their own
financial interests, at the expense of opportunities for us
non-billionaires.