Wealth
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The Particular Ways That Being Rich Screws You Up July 10, 2024
When a certain type of person reaches middle age without having achieved the level of professional recognition or personal happiness they feel they deserve, they’re apt to take a page from sociologists who study poverty and start searching for root c...
The Rich Are Not the Problem (We Are) December 20, 2023
Triangle of Sadness concerns wealthy passengers aboard a luxury yacht and the staff that serves them. We’re set up to hate the rich at first. When they introduce themselves at dinner, we meet the Russian “I sell shit” guy who earned his fortune in fe...
The Rich Don’t Dress Like You Think They Do May 16, 2023
Is Kendall Roy a fashion icon?The idea that the weak-willed scion of “Succession” is a figure whose wardrobe is worthy of emulation is an amusing realization to Michelle Matland, the costume designer for the HBO drama that tracks corporate and famili...
It's for You: In Memory of Landlines Lost May 11, 2023
The phone rang in my parents’ Park Avenue apartment. Not a phone. The phone.It was the late 1980s or early 1990s, I forget exactly when. Mobile phones were an unheard-of luxury, even for a double-income household on the Upper East Side. When the narr...
How Much Does an MFA Cost? March 01, 2023
I'll tell you.Tuition for the first year of my MFA program was $17,847. My participation in a graduate assistantship earned me $4,250 in tuition aid. I also received a $1,000 scholarship. Without that help, the first year of the program would’ve cost...
Tocqueville’s Worst Fears June 28, 2022
In the introduction to Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville asserted that the history of the world, or at least of the West, exhibited a providential, inevitable movement towards equality. As the scholar Marvin Zetterbaum argued in his book To...
How Inequality Is Experienced by the Very, Very Rich May 04, 2021
If you have ever wondered how the ultra-rich live, it turns out — are you ready for it? — they live pretty well. Even in the early, chaotic days of the pandemic, they managed as a class to thrive: hunkered down in the Hamptons while the values of the...
How the Super Rich Really Live? April 09, 2021
Mother Jones senior editor Michael Mechanic has written an engaging, informative, entertaining, and insightful forthcoming book Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All. Like actual jackpots, however, it loses a littl...
Stakeholder Theory Undermines the Rule of Law April 07, 2021
Whenever I lecture about markets, wealth and poverty, I always make one point which invariably shocks students: if you want to understand why some countries have successfully transitioned from widespread poverty to material affluence, and others have...
'Moneyland' Is an Urgent Exposé of the World of Mega-Wealth September 14, 2018
From the outside, 29 Harley Street looks like any other office block in central London. But it is an entry port to Moneyland, Oliver Bullough's term for a virtual country populated by the mega-rich and their hangers-on. The building came to prominenc...
