Suppose money and the economy embodied and furthered the best aspects of humanity, rather than the worst? Partially in honor of Occupy Wall Street’s one year anniversary, here’s a short film on the previously discussed idea of Sacred Economics:
Wealth
Also they need to drink, socialize, and complain less, and accept lower wages. She has praised paying African miners two dollars per day as a model for Australia to follow. Last year,…
Is the future of states such as Mississippi — which offers startlingly low life expectancy, sky high rates of poverty and disease, and minimal government regulation and protection — as laissez faire…
Wealth inequality between the super-rich and everyone else has been vastly underestimated, the Guardian reports: The world’s super-rich have taken advantage of lax tax rules to siphon off at least $21 trillion,…
Welcome to our sharecropper economy. A couple of years ago, eyebrows were raised by the news that the Walton family’s wealth was equal to that of the bottom 30 percent of U.S….
Writes Thomas H. Maugh II on the LA Times Science Now:
Crime doesn’t pay, at least not very well, when it comes to robbing banks, a new study finds. With unprecedented access to financial data from British banks, economists have shown that bank robbers don’t make a lot of money, certainly not enough to justify the risks involved in such an armed robbery.
“The return on an average bank robbery is, frankly, rubbish,” the researchers wrote in the statistics journal Significance. “It is not unimaginable wealth.” It is so low, in fact, that it is not financially worthwhile for banks to install screens that could further reduce robberies.
Economist Neil Rickman of the University of Surrey and his colleagues were given unusual access to financial data from the British Bankers’ Assn. Such data about robberies are not normally disclosed to the public because it is commercially sensitive and could potentially encourage copycat robbers. Treating bank robbery as a business like any other, they used normal statistical measures to calculate profitability…
A vigorous case for the super rich is argued by Edward Conard of Bain Capital in an interview with Adam Davidson for the New York Times Magazine: Ever since the financial crisis…
Completed a few weeks before the Occupy Wall Street protests began, the latest episode of Al Jazeera’s fantastic Fault Lines program takes a hard look at the wealthiest 1% in the United States, including talking to those in the 1% about what their wealth means:
Occupy George is a (presumably illegal) attempt to convey the reality of wealth distribution in the United States to the public by adding pertinent information to paper currency and circulating it as…
Roll Call has crunched the financial data to figure out the wealthiest members of Congress and compiled a list the top 50. Ol’ mule John Kerry comes in third, followed by California…
Via the NY Daily News: Peter Thiel has made his fortune by being part of the next big thing: He was a co-founder of Paypal and one of the early investors of…
Warren Buffett says we need a significantly higher income tax for the super-rich. But could that argument be a red herring? Partial Objects writes that the real conversation we need to be…
Here’s an excerpt from an article by G. William Domhoff on Global Research. This may not exactly be news to some of us, but it certainly re-affirms a lot:
…the bottom line is this: A highly complex and largely discrete set of laws and exemptions from laws has been put in place by those in the uppermost reaches of the U.S. financial system. It allows them to protect and increase their wealth and significantly affect the U.S. political and legislative processes. They have real power and real wealth. Ordinary citizens in the bottom 99.9% are largely not aware of these systems, do not understand how they work, are unlikely to participate in them, and have little likelihood of entering the top 0.5%, much less the top 0.1%. Moreover, those at the very top have no incentive whatsoever for revealing or changing the rules. I am not optimistic.
This is one of the most interesting studies on comparative religions that I have seen in a long time. Who’d be a Jehovah’s Witness, eh? David Leonhart reports for the New York…
In an effort to contain class resentment stemming from a growing wealth gap, China has outlawed public ads that extol luxurious or ‘high end’ things. Are they onto something? Partial Objects takes note:…
He may be plugging his new book, but Felix Dennis has some pretty perceptive things to say about rich people, himself included. Robert Frank profiles him for the Wall Street Journal: Felix…
Do you feel sorry for these people? Reuters reports on the millionaires who need more money to feel rich:
More than four out of ten American millionaires say they do not feel rich. Indeed many would need to have at least $7.5 million in order to feel they were truly rich, according to a Fidelity Investments survey.
Some 42 percent of the more than 1,000 millionaires surveyed by Fidelity said they did not feel wealthy. Respondents had at least $1 million in investable assets, excluding any real estate or retirement accounts.
“Every person in the survey is wealthy,” said Sanjiv Mirchandani…
Han Rosling describes over 200 years of morality/wealth progress of 200 countries in four minutes. Pinning life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Rosling describes a new perspective on the world we live in.