The Age of Oversupply: Overcoming the Greatest Challenge to the Global Economy by Alpert Daniel

Author:Alpert, Daniel [Alpert, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

THE PLUTOCRATIC WORLDVIEW

What we are seeing today is the emergence of a global plutocracy, not only in the get-rich-quick emerging nations but in the advanced nations as well, where a Second Gilded Age has been under way.

This plutocracy’s members tend to be only marginally concerned about the countries in which they actually live, seeing themselves instead (because they run corporations that operate globally) as citizens of the world. They have not merely enjoyed wealth and privilege, but have—perhaps to rationalize their station in a meritocracy in which luck also plays a significant role, or perhaps to justify it—formed an aristocracy of ideas, of self-generated and self-sustaining ideologies, and have promoted a “philanthrocapitalism” that has rendered the noblesse oblige of the original Gilded Age positively quaint by comparison.

In her 2012 book, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, the journalist Chrystia Freeland writes that “the ambition of the philanthro-capitalists doesn’t stop at transforming how charity works. They want to change how the state operates, too. These are men who have built their business by achieving the maximum impact with the minimum effort—either as financiers using leverage or technologists using scale. They think of their charitable dollar the same way. . . . The plutocrat-as-politician is becoming an important member of the world’s governing elite . . . [and] can use his own money to bankroll his campaign directly, and also to build a network of civic support through the less explicitly political donations of his personal foundation. Some farsighted plutocrats try to use their money not merely to buy public office for themselves but to redirect the reigning ideology of a nation, a region, or even the world.”4

In fact, the thinking advanced by some American, British, and even continental European members of this vaunted group would make the industrialists—even, perhaps, the royalty of yore—blush. And what they are saying is often mimicked by members of the political classes, especially some of those who entered politics after having made their own fortunes.

It’s not easy to describe the plutocratic worldview precisely, even though I have heard it recited many times in different ways in the business and political circles I travel in. Even though politicians and the media both give this view a wide berth, here are a few key implicit points you often hear from some of today’s super-wealthy (and perhaps more so from their sycophants):

■ That they are smarter than other people, and especially politicians, bureaucrats, school superintendents, and old-style nonprofit leaders. Why? Because they have made their fortune reinventing whole sectors, such as technology and finance.

■ That because they are so smart, and so good at solving problems and reinventing things, they deserve their fortunes, however crazily outsized these may be compared to what ordinary people earn. More than that, they deserve to be running large swaths of U.S. policy, such as education—and maybe even the executive branch, where their business smarts can be used to better manage the economy, as Romney repeatedly suggested.

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