The kind of fiscal “discipline” favored by City of London banker elites translated directly into the cuts to education and health and the reduced social mobility that left people angry and caused them to wonder how there was money to help foreigners.

People like Asher were regularly told, and had come to believe, that there were less hostile ways of solving problems than systemic reform.

Renzi dropped a casual aside in talking about his labor-market reforms that reflected another aspect of the globalist consensus. He said Italy’s rewriting, the previous year, of its hiring-and-firing laws had finally caught the country up to the standards of Germany and Britain. He added, “Obviously, U.S.A. arrived to this point twenty years ago.”

wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.”

“Is the playing field on which I accumulated my wealth level and fair? Does the system privilege people like me in ways that compound my advantages?” Were the rich, as Carnegie had presented them, the transitory guardians of progress’s fruits, or were they hereditary hoarders of that progress?

“The people who get to take advantage of the system, why would they really want to change it?” Tisch said at one point. “They’ll maybe give more money away, but they don’t want to radically change it.”

One could forget, watching such a civilized group, that traditional politics is argumentative for a reason. It isn’t that politicians don’t know how to be nice, but rather that politics is rooted in the idea of a big, motley people taking their fate into their own hands. Politics is the inherently messy business of negotiating and reconciling incom

is to personalize the political. If you want to be a thought leader and not dismissed as a critic, your job is to help the public see problems as personal and individual dramas rather than collective and systemic ones. It

giving his wealth (the profits earned by slashing those wages) away at his own discretion.” For Carnegie,