Chapter
WHY WE CAN’T AFFORD THE RICH
How people underestimate inequality
Why have the rich got a bigger share?
A different approach: ‘moral economy’
The belief in a just world
Part One. A guide to wealth extraction
2. Three dangerous words: ‘earnings’, ‘investment’ and ‘wealth’
3. Income: earned or unearned?
From land to patents, Wi-Fi, stars and celebrities: economic rent
5. Interest … for what? or We need to talk about usury
How banks create money for nothing and charge us interest for it
The consenting adults/entitlement defence
The pragmatic defence: interest is the only way
6. Profit from production; or Capitalists and rentiers: what’s the difference?
Shares and dividends: a bizarre institution
Owners or shareholders versus employees: who are the stakeholders?
7. Other ways to skin a cat
Capital gains, asset inflation and bubbles
What about the working rich? Getting paid for wealth extraction
8. Don’t the rich create jobs? And other objections
Don’t the rich create jobs?
‘Enterprise’: aren’t the rich the entrepreneurs?
The Jobs/Dyson defence: don’t truly innovative people deserve all they get?
‘They’ll just go to another country and take their money with them …’
The new small entrepreneur
Other objections and slogans
An objection from mainstream economics: ‘allocational efficiency’
Part Two. Putting the rich in context: what determines what people get?
9. To what do we owe our wealth? Our dependence on the commons
An important objection from the Right
What about private inheritance?
10. So what determines pay?
Do individuals’ incomes reflect the value of what they contribute?
Is everyone pulling their weight?
Hogging the nice work and offloading the bad
Don’t markets ensure that people get paid what they deserve?
What about inequalities of gender, race, sexuality, disability?
The Tea Party again: ‘you are not entitled to my income’
11. The myth of the level playing field
Part Three.How the rich got richer: their part in the crisis
12. The roots of the crisis
Finance and ‘the real economy’
Surplus capital floods the system
Putting everything up for sale
Privatisation and the neoliberal ‘strategic deficit’ plan
Bond markets: vigilantes, bogeymen and banks
Shuffling ownership: the market for companies
Intermediaries: the anonymous rich
CEOs’ pay: because they can
Bank bonuses: ‘Heads I win, tails you lose’
The City: the goose that laid the golden egg or the cuckoo in the nest?
Bailouts: socialism for the rich
14. Summing up: the crisis and the return of the rentier
Part Four. Rule by the rich, for the rich
15. How the rule of the rich works
Political donations: cash for policies
17. Legal corruption: above the law or making the law?
18. What about philanthropy?
What’s in it for the donor?
Philanthropy vs. democracy
19. Class: don’t mention the war!
‘Plutonomy’: for rich eyes only
Part Five. Ill-gotten and ill-spent: from consumption to CO2
Emulation, envy and vanity
21. The twist in the tail: global warming trumps everything
Global warming: the basics
Contraction and convergence
The diabolical double crisis
Reduced consumption: sufficiency?
Where does the problem of the rich come into this?
Taxing more and taxing less15
Pay and working conditions
Why we can't afford the rich
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