Sublime

Heather McGhee has argued in her book, The Sum of Us, that one group’s gain need not always come at another group’s expense and that adopting such a zero-sum mindset has time and again led poor whites to choose poverty and sickness over parity with Black Americans.[26] But it is also true that hoarding resources and passing laws that block the less

We know that because reading yet another frugality article is not going to change anyone’s behavior. And the estate tax affects less than 0.2 percent of people.

4. Gains are shared more equally than ever before.

These people’s wealth is determined almost exclusively by how high they can push flows — stocks and rates of return be damned. Everybody else is left with low or negative real returns and depleted stocks of capital and wealth. This is why GDP growth can be positive, while almost everybody feels poorer. Almost everybody is poorer. Objectively so. Th

Baumol’s cost disease to include any sector of the economy where demand is inelastic (goods and services that most consider “essential), and supply/productivity is naturally and/or artificially restricted. With this expanded definition, four sectors of the economy stand out as afflicted by cost disease: healthcare, higher education, housing, and ch

While other people spend many hours cutting coupons, agonizing over generic brands at the grocery store, or beating themselves up over a morning latte, they’re failing to see the bigger picture.

The American oligarchy, 1 percent of whom control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined, are the characters we envy and watch on television. They live and play in multimillion dollar beach houses and expansive modern lofts. They marry professional athletes and are chauffeured in stretch limos to spa appointments. They rush from fashion sh

Taxpayers in the top 5 percent of income already pay for more than 43 percent of the U.S. government, and taxpayers in the top 1 percent pay for more than 27 percent; at some point, taking more resources from the wealthy yields diminishing returns. Many of the Obama reforms, including much of the stimulus bill, and the health care bill, redistribut

At the same moment unemployment rose to near-Depression levels, the stock market reached a record high. The work economy and the investor economy occupied separate realities. The very rich became much richer—the country’s six-hundred-odd billionaires increased their wealth by nearly 50 percent. The richest of them all, Jeff Bezos, added around $70