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Aaron Swartz reviews Twilight of the Elites, an indictment of meritocracy
On Crooked Timber, Aaron Swartz reviews Twilight of the Elites, Chris Hayes's indictment of "meritocratic" society. I recently blogged an excerpt from Twilight, published in The Nation -- I was really...
View ArticleChinese corruption and looting on a vast scale: industry, government, and...
Here's a well-cited and pretty scary article describing the vast scale of corruption at the highest levels in China, and the extent to which "the success of 300m Chinese who live in western level...
View ArticleMan in a "drunken blackout" bought 69 percent of the global market in oil...
2009: "Between the hours of 1:22 a.m. and 3:41 a.m., [Steve Perkins] gradually bought 69 percent of the global market [7 million barrels of crude oil], while driving prices up from $71.40 to $73.05, by...
View ArticleRich America versus Poor America: stats about the wealth gap
Occupy's "99%" and "1%" slogans made America's widening wealth gap into part of the common discourse. But (as this video demonstrated) it's still hard to wrap your head around how widespread poverty...
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Judge to feuding rich Toronto families: you need a kindergarten teacher
In the matter of Morland-Jones v. Taerk -- two rich Toronto families who've tormented one another for years, Ontario Superior Court judge E.M. Morgan suggested that the parties do not need a judge;...
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Piketty's methods: parsing wealth inequality data and its critique
I've been writing about Thomas Piketty's magisterial economics bestseller Capital in the Twenty First Century for some time now (previously), and have been taking a close interest in criticisms of his...
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Riis's "How the Other Half Lives": photos of NYC slumlife in the Gilded Age
The full text and images of Jacob Riis's 1890 classic How The Other Half Lives is online (previously), featuring striking photos of the dire state of NYC poverty during the "gilded age," when wealth...
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Elite "wealth managers": Renfields to the one percent bloodsuckers
Lorq writes, "This brilliant piece of investigative research shines a light on one of the mechanisms of wealth inequality -- the secretive field of wealth management for the one percent. It's one...
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America's CEOs and hedge funds are starving the nation's corporations to death
Stock buybacks (previously) allow CEOs to drive up the company's share-price by using profits to buy shares back from investors, rather than investing the money in wages, R&D, capital or...
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CEOs are lucky, tall men
A new working paper [PDF] from three Harvard Business School researchers builds on the work of Texas A&M professor Markus Fitza, whose paper in last month's Strategic Management Journal showed...
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Shamrock shake: Pfizer's Irish "unpatriotic loophole" ducks US taxes
Pfizer's used a tax-dodge called a "reverse-inversion" to sell itself to a much smaller, Irish pharma company, moving its corporate nationality to Ireland at the stroke of a pen. (more…)
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Thomas Piketty seminar on Crooked Timber
The Crooked Timber folks have assembled a distinguished panel to discuss Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century, a must-read economics book (don't be scared by its brick-like appearance!). (more…)
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America: shrinking middle class, growing poverty, the rich are getting richer
A new Pew report analyzing data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors finds that America's middle class has shrunk to the smallest share of the US population for the...
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Saudi millionaire acquitted of raping teen in London, says he tripped and...
Ehsan Abdulaziz, a married, 46 year old, rich Saudi property developer, says he invited an 18 year old woman to sleep on his couch, and later tripped and fell on her as she lay asleep, accidentally...
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There's a secret, separate US tax system that rich people use to save billions
The richest people in America funnel billions into the creation and maintenance of a secret and shadowy tax-system that uses a combination of lobbying by front groups, high-priced tax lawyers, and...
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Tax havens hold $7.6 trillion; 8% of world's total wealth
Cass Sunstein reviews The Hidden Wealth of Nations, a new book by UC Berkeley's Gabriel Zucman; and a new documentary, The Price We Pay, both of which map out the scale of international tax-havens,...
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WATCH: stirring call for networked, global resistance to catastrophe and...
Zikzak sends us, "a beautiful, six-minute vid calling for networked global resistance in the face of the many catastrophes overwhelming the world. By the Woodbine collective, a DIY media project in...
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Thomas Piketty on Thomas Piketty
Crooked Timber's fascinating seminar on Thomas Piketty ran all through December, presenting arguments from economists, social scientists and political theorists from around the world on Piketty's...
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Why Americans can't stop working: the poor can't afford to, and the rich are...
Ever since Keynes's seminal 1930 paper Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren predicted that technological progress would virtually eliminate work by making labor much more productive,...
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Sympathetic Bernie Sanders profile in Bloomberg Businessweek
Joel Stein paints an incredibly sympathetic portrait of Sanders, painting him as a genuine true believer whose political tenures have been marked by equitable successes that benefited all his...
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