The Doom Loop of Oligarchy

by Ezra Klein

1) In the year's scariest economics book, Thomas Piketty argues that capitalism, left unchecked, subverts democracy by always and everywhere concentrating wealth at the tippy-top. That creates a class with so much economic power that they begin wielding tremendous political power, too. And then they use that political power to further increase their wealth, and then they use that wealth to further increase their political power, and so on.

2) You might call this the Doom Loop of Oligarchy: wealth buys power, which buys more wealth. You can see it playing out over the last two weeks in American politics.

3) Let's begin with the economics. A new study by economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman shows that the richest one percent of US households have almost doubled their share of the nation's wealth since the 1960s. One percent of the country owns more than 40 percent of the wealth — and that share is rising.

4) In contrast, the bottom 90 percent of the country owns less than 30 percent of the nation's wealth.

5) If you look closely, the rise of the one percent is actually the rise of the 0.1 percent. In the 1960s, this group owned about 10 percent of the nation's wealth. By 2012, they owned more than 20 percent.

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http://www.vox.com/2014/4/11/5581272/doom-loop-oligarchy