Atlantic: "The Rise of the New Global Elite"

[unixronin]

The Atlantic magazine has an article on The Rise of the New Global Elite.

It's long, but a worthwhile read, with some eye-opening perspectives and a few staggering details, such as the fact that in 2009 the top 25 hedge fund managers were paid more than $1 billion each.  It really brings home the manner in which many of today's hyper-rich have increasingly become completely disconnected from anything but each other.  Imagine the hardship of a society wife who has to solemnly explain over the dinner table, with a completely straight face, that after taxes there's only $10 million a year left of the $20 million her husband brings home.  My heart positively bleeds for her.  Why, if I had to live under such desperate financial straits...

Oh, wait.  That after-tax net is somewhere over two hundred times my entire pre-tax household income last year.  Explain to me again how this is hardship?

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not arguing for large-scale income redistribution, like, say, our current President does, though I do tend to think our executive compensation model (particularly in the financial sector) is rapidly progressing from the merely absurd into the drug-induced surreal.  But when you're making anywhere from two to four orders of magnitude more money after tax than the average American household's total gross income, you've got to have a lot of damned gall — not to mention utter detachment from the realities of everyday life outside your little upper-crust social club — to whine about how hard it is to make ends meet.

Comments

[wyrdling]

or, at least, no clue what a "difficult decision" really is...

[ithildae]

The top incomes are inflated because of perceived risk. (If you make a mistake, you are done, for life.) I suspect they are a bubble, they will pop.

It does show you that the newly, hyper-rich are not any smarter than most Americans, they spend more than they make. They are just as broke as I am, but when things go wahooni shaped, they will not be able to pull it together to get by. (They may be even more broke than I am, we are getting by without steady work, because of diversified income.)

I don't begrudge them the income. I want to find out how to get into that bracket.