Group items tagged

New customers include families traveling for spring break and corporate clients restricted from flying commercially who are able to spend up to $7,000 an hour for a charter flight. And this isn’t just about the plane: Many clients have expressed fear of traveling through large airports, especially after seeing news reports of crowds crammed into Chicago’s O’Hare and New York’s JFK. Most private planes fly out of small terminals reserved for VIP customers.

doctors with concierge service are suddenly in high demand. The idea is simple. Clients pay an annual fee, which allows the doctors to spend more time with fewer patients. It’s the modern version of the small-town general physician who’s been taking care of families for decades.

Long’s practice isn’t just for the rich, but his clients — about 60 percent are older than 60 — pay about $2,000 a year for the personal attention and access a concierge physician can provide.

Clients with MD2, which has practices in New York, Beverly Hills, McLean and other high-income locations, pay $15,000-$25,000 annually for doctors who serve only 50 families

“We have seen a substantial increase in the desire to fly private,” says Stephanie Chung, president of JetSuite, a top luxury rental company. “In the past few weeks and particularly this past week, we have seen an uptick of about 5 to 10 percent in new inquiries from travelers that have not flown private in the past.”

Historians believe the disease killed about 75 million people, a third of Europe’s population overall, and most of the victims were poor. “Plague is primarily an urban phenomenon,” says Keller. As with most pandemics, the disease spread quickly among those living in close quarters

Mortality demographics are hard to pinpoint before the 19th century, but it is believed that the wealthy fared far better because they were better fed and healthier to begin with.

Cholera is the “health and wealth story of the 19th century,” explains Keller. The first pandemic began in Jessore, India, in 1817 — where hundreds of thousands died — and reached Europe by 1831, killing 6,500 in London and 18,000 in Paris. Almost all of these deaths occurred in the poorest, most crowded sections of the cities, the product of contaminated food or water.

In 1842, Edgar Allan Poe wrote "Masque of the Red Death." The short story, one of Poe's best, is set in a fictional country where a gruesome disease called the Red Death has ravaged the land.

The ruler, Prince Prospero, is not afraid. He closes his palace to all except a thousand of his favorite knights and ladies, then welds the doors shut. “With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion,” writes Poe. “The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure.

One night, the prince decides to host a masquerade ball for his friends. At midnight, a guest arrives wearing a mask of a corpse and a costume like a funeral shroud. Prospero is furious at the tasteless display; his guests shrink away. The prince confronts the figure and immediately dies.

You can guess what happens next: Everyone else in the castle dies. “And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all,” concludes Poe.

The solution was to build economic class right into the structure of government.

Many in the founding generation believed America was exceptional because of the extraordinary degree of economic equality within the political community as they defined it

it wasn’t an oversight. The founding generation knew how to write class-warfare constitutions — they even debated such proposals during the summer of 1787.

Part of the reason was practical. James Madison’s notes from the secret debates at the Philadelphia Convention show that the delegates had a hard time agreeing on how they would design such a class-based system. But part of the reason was political: They knew the American people wouldn’t agree to that kind of government.

What is surprising about the design of our Constitution is that it isn’t a class warfare constitution. Our Constitution doesn’t mandate that only the wealthy can become senators, and we don’t have a tribune of the plebs. Our founding charter doesn’t have structural checks and balances between economic classes: not between rich and poor, and certainly not between corporate interests and ordinary workers. This was a radical change in the history of constitutional government

Unlike Europe, America wasn’t bogged down by the legacy of feudalism, nor did it have a hereditary aristocracy

As long as the new nation could expand west, he thought, it would be possible to have a citizenry of independent yeoman farmers. In a community with economic equality, there was simply no need for constitutional structures to manage the clash between the wealthy and everyone else.

In 1976 the richest 1 percent of Americans took home about 8.5 percent of our national income. Today they take home more than 20 percent

While much of the debate has been on the moral or economic consequences of economic inequality, the more fundamental problem is that our constitutional system might not survive in an unequal economy

Campaign contributions, lobbying, the revolving door of industry insiders working in government, interest group influence over regulators and even think tanks — all of these features of our current political system skew policy making to favor the wealthy and entrenched economic interests. “The rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest,” Gouverneur Morris observed in 1787. “They always did. They always will.” An oligarchy — not a republic — is the inevitable result.

As a republic descends into an oligarchy, the people revolt. Populist revolts are rarely anarchic; they require leadership. Morris predicted that the rich would take advantage of the people’s “passions” and “make these the instruments for oppressing them.”

Alexander Hamilton put it more clearly: “Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people: commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.

Populists and progressives responded by pushing for reforms that would tame the great concentrations of wealth and power that were corrupting government.

On the economic side, they invented antitrust laws and public utilities regulation, established an income tax, and fought for minimum wages. On the political side, they passed campaign finance regulations and amended the Constitution so the people would get to elect senators directly. They did these things because they knew that our republican form of government could not survive in an economically unequal society. As Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “There can be no real political democracy unless there is something approaching an economic democracy.”

For all its resilience and longevity, our Constitution doesn’t have structural checks built into it to prevent oligarchy or populist demagogues. It was written on the assumption that America would remain relatively equal economically.

Madison worried that the number of Americans who had only the “bare necessities of life” would one day increase. When it did, he concluded, the institutions and laws of the country would need to be adapted, and that task would require “all the wisdom of the wisest patriots.”

The group to watch -- the group that expanded its share of the top earners' pie -- was the nation's financiers. Back in 1979, the financial sector represented only 11 percent of the Really and Stinking Rich. By 2005, financiers represented 18 percent

Between 1980 and 2000, the assets held by commercial banks, securities firms, and the securitizations they created grew from [the equivalent of] 55 percent of GDP to [the equivalent of] 95 percent

The growth was faster still for the largest banks. Between 1990 and 1999, the ten largest bank holding companies' share of all bank assets grew from 26 percent to 45 percent, and their share of all deposits doubled from 17 percent to 34 percent.

In effect, Wall Street ate the economy.

Very little actual work or production is being relocated. What’s really changing are the addresses of those who own and control the capital

Some progressive economists have rightly countered that enabling the wealthiest Americans to write off their state and local tax payments is highly regressive, amounting to a tax break of $100 billion or more a year that flows mainly to the very rich

Until recently, high-tax cities had a fighting chance against their lower-tax rivals. That is why so many blue-state politicians have called for getting rid of the Trump-era caps and restoring the ability to deduct state and local taxes.

But eliminating those write-offs has created a race to the bottom that is already devastating the budgets of expensive coastal cities

Others recommend replacing the SALT deduction with a 15% credit for state and local taxes. Given the pressure from Democrats in impacted cities, this is something that the Biden-Harris administration may have to revisit. 

the effect of new remote technology on state and local taxes requires some serious scrutiny by all levels of government. As more Americans, especially the 1%, have flexibility about where they work, city and state governments will need to develop new revenue models that account for the locations of both the people and their businesses

When an advantaged class can live thousands of miles away from where they work and own assets, it deprives cities of a vital source of revenue.

University of Virginia law professor Michael Doran — who held tax policy roles at the Treasury Department under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — calls the current state of affairs “the great American retirement fraud.”

Secure 2.0 would take the fraud to a new level: Its congressional supporters have engaged in Enron-style accounting gimmicks to mask the bill’s effects on deficit

from the outset, IRAs were a generous gift to the upper class. At the time, very few low- and middle-income individuals could afford to stash $1,500 in a retirement account each year — median income for U.S. households was $11,100 in 1974 — so the people taking full advantage of the new IRAs tended to be relatively rich

since the benefit was structured as a deduction, it was worth more to taxpayers in higher income brackets.

In the nearly half-century since, Congress has continually expanded the amount that individuals can pour into tax-deferred savings accounts.

Now, the JCT estimates that 401(k)s and other similar defined-contribution plans cost the federal government $200 billion per year.

individuals can contribute up to $6,000 per year to an IRA ($7,000 if age 50 or older), plus $20,500 to a 401(k) ($27,000 for 50-year-olds and up), with their employers potentially chipping in to bring the 401(k) total to $61,000 ($67,500 for the over-50 set).

In 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, 58 percent of taxpayers with wage income made no contribution to 401(k)-style plans, and less than 4 percent bumped up against the contribution cap.

As of 2020, approximately 63 percent of U.S. households had no such accounts.

I calculated that an individual who made the maximum 401(k) contributions since 1990, investing exclusively in an S&P 500 index fund, would have more than $7 million in her account today.

When JCT released data last summer showing that 28,615 taxpayers had accumulated $5 million or more in IRAs, lawmakers cried foul. Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), who as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee is the top tax writer in the House, lamented the “exploitation” of IRAs. “IRAs are intended to help Americans achieve long-term financial security, not to enable those who already have extraordinary wealth to avoid paying their fair share in taxes,”

(The very largest IRAs, like PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s reported $5 billion account, result from a different loophole: the ability of founders and early-stage investors to stuff IRAs with start-up stock

Forbes revealed more than a decade ago that Thiel and another PayPal co-founder were using their IRAs to shelter entrepreneurial earnings; the Government Accountability Office flagged the IRA-stuffing phenomenon in 2014; and rather than clamping down, lawmakers from both parties sat on their hands.)

The Secure 2.0 bill, sponsored by Neal, doubles down on the inequities of the status quo. It will inevitably result in even more of the mega-IRAs that Neal and other Democrats decry.

Under current law, taxpayers must begin to take withdrawals from their 401(k)s and traditional IRAs at age 72. (It had been 70½ before Secure 1.0, signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2019, raised the age by a year and a half.

Secure 2.0 would bump that up to age 75. The change would mean that taxpayers with supersize IRAs could enjoy three extra years of tax-free growth before they needed to take money out

Lower-income retirees wouldn’t benefit because they don’t have the luxury of holding off on withdrawals, which they need to cover living expenses.

Another provision would lift the cap on 401(k) catch-up contributions at ages 62, 63 and 64 from $6,500 to $10,000. Factoring in employer matching contributions, that would raise the maximum 401(k) inflow to $71,000 per year.

if lawmakers were genuinely concerned about retirement security for people who need it, they wouldn’t start by aiding taxpayers who can afford to save more each year than most Americans earn. The higher limit on catch-up contributions will simply allow high-income taxpayers to race further ahead.

The top-weighted benefits of Secure 2.0 might be tolerable if they were offset by other tax increases on the rich — if this were all just moving money from one deep pocket to another. But the items audaciously labeled as “revenue provisions” in the bill generate revenue as real as Monopoly money.

The Rothification provisions in Secure 2.0 bring $35 billion of revenue into the 10-year window — ostensibly offsetting the cost of the bill’s giveaways — but the $35 billion is pure make-believe: It comes at the expense of an equivalent amount of revenue down the road.

If lawmakers from either party were truly concerned about the plight of low-income retirees, they would focus on strengthening Social Security, which actually provides a safety net for older people, rather than adding more deficit-financed bells and whistles to retirement accounts for the rich.

compared with the citizens of these nations, American infants are less likely to turn 5, American teenagers are less likely to turn 30, and American 30-somethings are less likely to survive to retirement.

I called the U.S. the rich death trap of the modern world. The “rich” part is important to observe and hard to overstate. The typical American spends almost 50 percent more each year than the typical Brit, and a trucker in Oklahoma earns more than a doctor in Portugal.

A series about big problems and big solutions

the typical American is 100 percent more likely to die than the typical Western European at almost every age from birth until retirement.

A series about big problems and big solutions

magine I offered you a pill and told you that taking this mystery medication would have two effects. First, it would increase your disposable income by almost half. Second, it would double your odds of dying in the next 365 days. To be an average American is to fill a lifetime prescription of that medication and take the pill nightly.

1.8 figure as “the U.S. death ratio”—the annual mortality rate in the U.S., as a multiple of similarly rich countries.

By the time an American turns 18, the U.S. death ratio surges to 2.8. By 29, the U.S. death ratio rockets to its peak of 4.22, meaning that the typical American is more than four times more likely to die than the average resident in our basket of high-income nations.

The average American my age, in his mid-to-late 30s, is roughly six times more likely to die in the next year than his counterpart in Switzerland.

The average U.S. death ratio stays higher than three for practically the entire period between ages 30 and 50, meaning that the typical middle-aged American is roughly three times more likely to die within the year than his counterpart in Western Europe or Australia.

One could tell a similar story about drug

I expected that these three culprits—guns, drugs, and cars—would explain most of our death ratio

Americans drive more than other countries, leading to our higher-than-average death rate from road accidents

America suffers not from a monopoly on despair and aggression, but from an oversupply of instruments of death. We have more drug-overdose deaths than any other high-income country because we have so much more fentanyl, even per capita

he argued that Americans’ health (and access to health care) seems to be the most important factor. America’s prevalence of cardiovascular and metabolic disease is so high that it accounts for more of our early mortality than guns, drugs, and cars combined.

Disentangling America’s health issues is complicated, but I can offer three data points

First, American obesity is unusually high, which likely leads to a larger number of early and middle-aged death

Second, Americans are unusually sedentary. We take at least 30 percent fewer steps a day than people do in Australia, Switzerland, and Japan

Finally, U.S. access to care is unusually unequal—and our health-care outcomes are unusually tied to income.

voters and politicians in the U.S. care so much about freedom in that old-fashioned ’Merica-lovin’ kind of way that we’re unwilling to promote public safety if those rules constrict individual choice. That’s how you get a country with infamously laissez-faire firearms laws, more guns than people, lax and poorly enforced driving laws, and a conservative movement that has repeatedly tried to block, overturn, or limit the expansion of universal health insurance on the grounds that it impedes consumer choice.

Among the rich, this hyper-individualistic mindset can manifest as a smash-and-grab attitude toward life, with surprising consequences for the less fortunate. For example, childhood obesity is on the rise at the same time that youth-sports participation is in decline among low-income kids

What seems to be happening at the national level is that rich families, seeking to burnish their child’s résumé for college, are pulling their kids out of local leagues so that they can participate in prestigious pay-to-play travel teams. At scale, these decisions devastate the local youth-sports leagues for the benefit of increasing by half a percentage point the odds of a wealthy kid getting into an Ivy League school.

The problem with the Freedom and Individualism Theory of Everything is that, in many cases, America’s problem isn’t freedom-worship, but actually something quite like its opposite: overregulation

In medicine, excessive regulation and risk aversion on the part of the FDA and Institutional Review Boards have very likely slowed the development and adoption of new lifesaving treatments.

Are Americans unusually sedentary because they love freedom so very much? It’s possible, I guess. But the more likely explanation is that restrictive housing policies have made it too hard for middle- and low-income families to live near downtown business districts, which forces many of them to drive more than they would like, thus reducing everyday walking and exercise.

America is caught in a lurch between oversight and overkill, sometimes promoting individual freedom, with luridly fatal consequences, and sometimes blocking policies and products, with subtly fatal consequences.

Democrats and Republicans agree that America faces a long-run fiscal imbalance that in the coming decades will most likely require cutting social services, raising taxes or both — policies that directly influence income distribution. Who will bear the brunt of this rebalancing will depend on whether the government uses tax and other policies to counteract rising income inequality with greater redistribution.

Since the 1970s, income inequality in the United States has increased at a historic rate. In 1970, the richest 1 percent of Americans enjoyed 9 percent of total national pre-tax income. In 2011, by contrast, that share had risen to 19.8 percent. And this large increase in inequality has not been softened by more progressive tax policy. Tax rates on the top 1 percent of taxpayers have fallen over the same period.

Between 1991 and 2010, roughly 28 percent of Americans in the General Social Survey — a continuing survey of opinions and attitudes in the United States, conducted by the University of Chicago — agreed that the federal government should “improve the standard of living of all poor Americans.” (Forty-five percent were neutral, and 27 percent agreed that “it is not the government’s responsibility, and that each person should take care of himself.”) This was a sharp decline — 5 percentage points on average — in support for redistribution relative to those surveyed between 1975 and 1990.

The survey has also revealed that the share of respondents who believe that the rich should pay proportionally more of their income in taxes than the poor is substantially lower now than in 1987.

Those who saw our tutorial became 20 percent less likely to agree that government could be trusted at least “some of the time” — a surprisingly large effect. By emphasizing to respondents the level and growth of income inequality over the last several decades, our tutorial appears to have simultaneously undercut their trust in government’s ability to fix the problem. After all, if the government let things get this bad, respondents might logically conclude that it is also unable to do much to fix the situation.

confidence in government has dropped over the past 30 years. From 1976 to 1989, 23 percent of respondents, on average, reported having “hardly any” confidence in Congress. Since 1990, that number has risen by more than 11 percentage points. The survey has revealed an almost identical erosion of confidence in the executive branch of the federal government.

On one hand, liberals can take heart in the news that Americans are deeply troubled about the current level of income inequality. On the other hand, conservatives may be glad to hear that despite this concern, Americans have a healthy skepticism that government can be trusted to do much about it.

Proponents of greater redistribution can probably save their breath pointing out that inequality is a problem. Instead, they face what seems to be a much more difficult task: convincing them that their government is up to the task of addressing it.

globalization has produced enormous benefits. From 1970 to the 2008 financial crisis, global output quadrupled, and the benefits did not flow exclusively to the rich. According to the economist Steven Radelet, the number of people living in extreme poverty in developing countries fell from 42 percent in 1993 to 17 percent in 2011, while the percentage of children born in developing countries who died before their fifth birthday declined from 22 percent in 1960 to less than 5 percent by 2016.

statistics like these do not reflect the lived experience of many people. The shift of manufacturing from the West to low labor-cost regions has meant that Asia’s rising middle classes have grown at the expense of rich countries’ working-class communities

from a cultural standpoint, the huge movement of ideas, people and goods across national borders has disrupted traditional communities and ways of doing business. For some this has presented tremendous opportunity, but for others it is a threat.

This disruption has been closely associated with the growth of American power and the liberal world order that the United States has shaped since the end of World War II. Understandably, there has been blowback, both against the United States and within the nation.

Liberalism is based on a rule of law that maintains a level playing field for all citizens, particularly the right to private property

The democratic part, political choice, is the enforcer of communal choices and accountable to the citizenry as a whole

Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed revolts around the world of the democratic part of this equation against the liberal one

Vladimir Putin, perhaps the world’s chief practitioner of illiberal democracy. Mr. Putin has become very popular in Russia, particularly since his annexation of Crimea in 2014. He does not feel bound by law: Mr. Putin and his cronies use political power to enrich themselves and business wealth to guarantee their hold on power.

Mr. Orbán, Mr. Putin and Mr. Erdogan all came to power in countries with an electorate polarized between a more liberal, cosmopolitan urban elite — whether in Budapest, Moscow or Istanbul — and a less-educated rural voter base. This social division is similar to the one that drove the Brexit vote in Britain and Donald Trump’s rise in the United States..

Mr. Trump’s ascent poses a unique challenge to the American system because he fits comfortably into the trend toward illiberal democracy.

Like Mr. Putin, Mr. Trump seemsto want to use a democratic mandate to undermine the checks and balances that characterize a genuine liberal democracy. He will be an oligarch in the Russian mold: a rich man who used his wealth to gain political power and who would use political power to enrich himself once in office

The citizens of India and Japan have elected nationalist leaders who many say they believe champion a more closed form of identity than their predecessors

How far will this trend toward illiberal democracy go? Are we headed for a period like that of the early 20th century, in which global politics sank into conflict over closed and aggressive nationalism?

The outcome will depend on several critical factors, particularly the way global elites respond to the backlash they have engendered.

In America and Europe, elites made huge policy blunders in recent years that hurt ordinary people more than themselves.

Deregulation of financial markets laid the groundwork for the subprime crisis in the United States, while a badly designed euro contributed to the debt crisis in Greece, and the Schengen system of open borders made it difficult to control the flood of refugees in Europe. Elites must acknowledge their roles in creating these situations.

Now it’s up to the elites to fix damaged institutions and to better buffer those segments of their own societies that have not benefited from globalization to the same extent.

Above all, it is important to keep in mind that reversing the existing liberal world order would likely make things worse for everyone, including those left behind by globalization. The fundamental driver of job loss in the developed world, after all, is not immigration or trade, but technological change.

We need better systems for buffering people against disruption, even as we recognize that disruption is inevitable. The alternative is to end up with the worst of both worlds, in which a closed and collapsing system of global trade breeds even more inequality.

Doris knew nothing about raising children, nor much cared. The witheringly wry, worldly heiress was among the most celebrated women of her day, a six-foot glamour queen hounded by paparazzi, who brushed elbows with every midcentury icon from Jackie Kennedy to Elvis Presley, pronouncing Greta Garbo "boring" and, after dating Errol Flynn, theorizing that bisexual men made the best lovers: "I should know," she declared. "I've done exhausting research on the subject." As a child – and sole inheritor of her father Buck's $100 million fortune – she'd become famous as "the richest little girl in the world." She'd been raised by nannies in a chilly, silent Fifth Avenue mansion, with her parents taking little part in her upbringing; family lore holds that her father, on his deathbed in 1925, told 12-year-old Doris, "Trust no one." Now saddled with her pesky nephew Walker, watching him toss ketchup-covered tampons into her pool, Doris Duke regarded him with pity. He was desperate for love and attention, much like herself as a child. But Doris had her own fabulous life to live, and so she shipped Walker off to boarding school. "We were all too self-centered to be bothered with a problem child," she would later tell her cousin Angier St. George Biddle "Pony" Duke.

His grandmother's will had stipulated that if Walker left no heirs, upon his death his trust would be funneled into the Duke Endowment, a $2.8 billion foundation established by Buck Duke that nourishes, among other institutions, Duke University. The idea repulsed Walker: The very name that had given him such unearned bounty also stood for everything he felt he'd been deprived. "He despised Duke!" says longtime friend Mike Todd. "Duke University, Duke Foundation – everything Duke, he hated."

At school the twins had trouble connecting with classmates, few of whom were allowed over to the Inmans' mansion a second time after gaping at the guns, the explicit art and sometimes an eyeful of Walker, who preferred to be nude. Other kids went to summer camp, but the Inmans went to Abu Dhabi to bid millions at auctions; to Japan, where their father introduced them to friends who were supposedly yakuza; to Fiji, where Dad praised them as they dined on poisonous puffer fish. There were getaways aboard the Devine Decadence, which was docked in New Zealand. One day toward the end of second grade, when their father had yanked them out of school without warning, they told themselves it was for the best.

The past three years have been a struggle for the twins as they've grappled with their past. Before they were able to live with Daisha, they were sent to the Wyoming Behavioral Institute. The twins were suicidal, uncooperative and dangerously underweight. Therapist Jennifer Greenup had never seen such extreme emotional deprivation before. "If even a quarter of what they said happened to them happened, they are severely traumatized children," says Greenup, adding, "Their symptoms are real. Whether it's paranoia, lack of trust or hostility." Eventually the kids were able to move in with Daisha and began bonding, a triumph unto itself. But although they've taken positive steps, Greenup says the scale of their trauma is so great that she can't gauge their progress: "I can't say they're progressing well, because there's nothing to compare it to," she admits.

As for the kids' own plans, Patterson seems to hope for a quiet life. "I hope I don't have to live alone. But I actually don't mind. I'll just sit at Greenfield, fishing by my dad's little tomb, just talking about life," he says. "You can't trust anyone," he adds mournfully, repeating the words he learned from his father, which Walker learned from his aunt Doris, which she learned from her father, Buck Duke.

According to news reports, the buyer paid some $75 million for it and resolved to spend the same again on enhancements, including basement excavations for features including a 70-foot swimming pool and a garage for 25 cars. Once the renovations are complete, the house will command a resale value of $450 million.

the areas first and most affected by climate change are the poorest regions of earth, we are talking about the least seen, least represented group on our planet.

That’s something humanity has never done before.

Pessimism would be an ethical catastrophe. It leads only to despair, despair to inaction, and inaction to a future world David Attenborough has described as “the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world.”

we have to stay positive; it’s the only moral response to this crisis.

“We have all the tools we need, today, to stop it all: a carbon tax and the political apparatus to aggressively phase out dirty energy, a new approach to agricultural practices and a shift away from beef and dairy in the global diet; and public investment in green energy and carbon capture.”

Global emissions could be cut by a third if the richest 10 percent of humanity cut their use of energy to the same level as affluent, comfortable Europe.

Climate change is “not just the biggest threat human life on the planet has ever faced but a threat of an entirely different category and scale,”

Even if collective action manages to keep us to 2 degrees Celsius of warming — a target it looks like we are currently on course to miss — we would be facing a world in which “the ice sheets will begin their collapse, global G.D.P. per capita will be cut by 13 percent, 400 million more people will suffer from water scarcity, major cities in the equatorial band of the planet will become unlivable

“this is our best case scenario.”

We will see migration on a scale the world has never experienced: United Nations and World Bank estimates of how many people will be forcibly displaced by the middle of this century range from the tens to the hundreds of millions.

All of this will affect the world’s poor far more than the world’s rich.

We are facing a call to action that we are, on the evidence of our behavior so far, likely to ignore, unless we directly feel its urgency

The science of global warming has been settled for 40 years, but we have not just continued to pollute, we have accelerated the rate at which we’ve been doing so

“We have done as much damage to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain human life and civilization since Al Gore published his first book on the climate than in all the centuries — all the millenniums — that came before.”

It’s not just that we know what’s happening, it’s that we’ve known for years and done nothing.

So why didn’t they?

Scientists struggled to put across a clear message with sufficient force

The effect of all this was that the fight against climate change lost momentum at a critical point.

The greater part of responsibility for the failure, however, lies with politicians and energy companies

With American leadership, Rich writes, “warming could have been held to less than 1.5 degrees.”

Climate change is a tragedy, but Rich makes clear that it is also a crime — a thing that bad people knowingly made worse, for their personal gain

posterity will find it hard to believe, and impossible to forgive.

So each show retains a number of wealth consultants — some of them billionaires and some of them vendors who cater to billionaires — who advise on what uniforms household staff might wear or which artwo

Cost aside, one way these shows suggest wealth is less about the items themselves than how the characters react to them. In the second season of “Billions,” Bobby and Lara Axelrod board his-and-her private jets with no more fanfare than a quick goodbye kiss. The characters aren’t awed, so the camera isn’t either.

“Succession” mostly steers clear of beauty shots. Armstrong told his team, “Let’s never try to persuade anyone or sell anyone on an element of this lifestyle.” The characters tend to treat wealth casually, even disdainfully, regifting a Patek-Philippe, stepping into a Sikorsky helicopter as if it’s one more town car.

When even “Dynasty” unleashes a socioeconomic critique, it suggests suspicion of the very rich, an anxiety that they may not be like the rest of us. That anxiety might have merit. The 1980s — the era of the first “Dynasty” — and the present are periods associated with huge increases in wealth inequality.

“Rich people have become so different from the average person,” said Shamus Khan, a Columbia University sociology professor who researches the political influence of economic elites. “They’re of interest in the way that a zoo animal is of interest.”

“People imagine that it’s going to bring some meaning to them or satisfy some need,” he said. However, “rich people often describe themselves as feeling dead inside.”

The wealthy characters in these shows often choose money over family, community or moral integrity. The design — luxurious, but sometimes cold and unbeautiful — reflects that.

Parents deploy their wealth to make their children look interesting and have the right “talents.” It works: Children from the top 1 percent are 77 times more likely to attend elite colleges than children from the bottom 20 percent.  

For the super-rich, the legal scam of buying your child a spot at an elite school through, say, giving a building is a secret so open it’s hardly a secret at all

I spoke to someone who’d worked in development at a boarding school that had long served as a feeder to the Ivy League. At the time he told me that to get into an Ivy school, you need to give about $5 million.

They may not even be able to talk about this: It’s become standard to require admissions officers to sign nondisclosure agreements. 

Kushner has objected that he graduated from Harvard with honors, but since about 90 percent of his class did, too, that hardly proves he was more deserving of admission than people whose families didn’t have $2.5 million to give. 

while Harvard accepted about 11 percent of applicants in the late 1990s, when Kushner was admitted (the admission rate is lower now), more than half of the members of the Harvard Committee on University Resources — made up of some of the school’s biggest donors — had children then at the university, and many had sent more than one there.

Based on my research, I’d bet that there are orders of magnitude more students at elite colleges who took the “philanthropy” route to admission rather than the bribery one.

the true tragedy is that almost all rich families buy their kids into elite colleges by purchasing advantages they pass off as talents, whether by way of sailing lessons or elaborate vacations planned with an eye on admissions essays. We view these vastly overrepresented children of the rich as having earned their spots. And that’s the great American delusion we call “meritocracy.” 

My parents gave me a lot I’m enormously grateful for: violin lessons that cost thousands of dollars a year, trips to museums and sites in foreign countries. My boarding-school classmates enjoyed much more: prestigious unpaid internships, interview coaching and tutors who helped with the work of every class.

This is the real scandal. The 1 percent — more than 1 million American households — have more and more money, and they’re using huge sums so their children can get a leg up on the rest

Those students escape questions about whether they deserve to be there, unlike people who benefit from programs like affirmative action, which could help moderate those advantages. Instead of thinking about this as a problem inherent in the system, we call it the virtue of meritocracy. And we look to the poor and middle classes and ask, “Why aren’t you more talented?”

Most interestingly, Americans still don’t care that much. Sure, two-thirds say they are dissatisfied with the way income and wealth are distributed, according to Gallup. Still, more than three out of five — compared with just over half six years ago — are satisfied with “the opportunity for a person in this nation to get ahead by working hard.”

As my column has aimed to highlight, too many Americans are, well, sinking. Seventeen percent of Americans are poor by international standards — living on less than half the nationwide median income. That’s more than twice the share of poor people in France, Iceland or the Netherlands.

Unequipped to cope with the demands of a labor market in furious transformation, they will give “social mobility” a new, all-American meaning: the tendency to move in and out of prison. It’s hard to believe any country could waste so many resources and prosper.

Or let’s measure our progress in terms of infant deaths. Scientists in the United States invented many of the technologies used around the world to keep vulnerable babies alive. So how come our infant mortality rate is higher than that of every nation in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development with the exceptions of Mexico, Chile and Turkey?

The impact of the nation’s fundamental paradox mostly fails the nonwhite and the poor. Black males born in the United States today will probably live shorter lives than boys born in Mexico, China or Turkey.

The children of poverty who survive will most likely hobble through life with mediocre educations — lagging their more affluent peers even before their first day in school and then falling farther behind, deprived of the resources that disadvantaged children in other advanced nations routinely enjoy.

Forget about income, though. It’s hard to square Americans’ belief in their society’s greatness with the life expectancy of its newborn girls and boys. It is shorter than in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and probably a few other countries I missed.

America is doubling down on its exceptionalism. The rich got a tax break. Bankers got a break from the pesky rules written in the shadow of the financial crisis to protect the little guy. The poor and near poor were freed from their ability to afford health insurance.

populism — understood as a political movement shaped around giving the working class a “fair shake” — is pretty much dead.

His colleagues are furious. At least two House members have tested positive for coronavirus, while a number of others are awaiting test results or in quarantine after coming into contact with an infected person.

Republican congressman Fred Upton of Michigan said he was “driving back to DC to help get this thing over the finish line” while several lawmakers from western states said they were jumping on red-eye flights to make it back in time.

“Members are advised that it is possible this measure will not pass by voice vote,” House majority leader Steny Hoyer wrote in an advisory to members on Thursday night. “Members are encouraged to follow the guidance of their local and state health officials, however if they are able and willing to be in Washington DC by 10am [Friday]. Members are encouraged to do so with caution.”

“We will be monitoring the number of members in the Capitol and on the floor to ensure we maintain safe social distancing at all times,” they added. “Members who are ill with respiratory symptoms or fever are discouraged from attending.”

Members of Congress are racing back to Washington, despite social isolation guidelines, out of fear that a lawmaker could delay a Friday vote on the $2.2tn economic stimulus package designed to rush federal aid to workers, businesses and a healthcare system ravaged by the coronavirus.

The desire by House leaders was to pass the bill with a “voice vote” – when everyone in the chamber shouts “aye” or “no” and the loudest group prevails. But any member of Congress can demand a rollcall vote and require a quorum, forcing at least 216 lawmakers to return to Washington in the midst of a pandemic to ensure the bill passes.

His colleagues are furious. At least two House members have tested positive for coronavirus, while a number of others are awaiting test results or in quarantine after coming into contact with an infected person.

There is no doubt the law has enough support to pass.

The House will convened at 9am ET. There will be three hours of debate on the legislation before they attempt to pass the bill by voice vote.

If a recorded vote is required, the House is planning to enforce strict social distancing guidelines, allowing members on the floor to vote in small groups to avoid crowding.

The idea of sending people back to work and restarting the economy had been floating around last weekend, propagated by two opinion pieces in particular. One was written on Medium. Another, published two days before the Hilton show, was an opinion piece by David Katz, a former director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, which was published by the New York Times. Given the reach of the New York Times this piece, headlined Is Our Fight Against Coronavirus Worse Than the Disease?, attracted huge attention.

In time, people would develop immunity to the coronavirus, and in the meantime, damage to the economy would be minimized, Katz opined.

Katz’s piece was shared widely among conservatives, including by Fox News host and informal Trump adviser Pete Hegseth. The article served as a handy tool for conservatives advancing the argument that the economy shouldn’t be sacrificed for coronavirus containment.

“Dr Katz’s efforts on behalf of public health during this pandemic are uncompensated and born from a sense of duty and commitment to public health,” a spokeswoman for Katz told the Guardian. She pointed to a post Katz wrote on LinkedIn following the criticism, where he stresses how damage to the economy is also a massive public health issue.

He said: “The other thing is, low risk doesn’t mean no risk. We don’t know the natural history of the disease well enough to say: ‘Everybody under 65 is A-OK and ready to go back to work.’”

The concept of trading off self-isolation for returning to normal to help the economy has also been pushed by Trump’s cabinet including, his economic adviser Larry Kudlow, who on Tuesday told reporters: “Public health includes economic health.”

This concerted attack on professionalism made it easier for Trump and Boris Johnson to claim that they might just know better than leading scientists. Business leaders are praised as more capable decision-makers, when it comes to the length of a lockdown, than epidemiologists. Trump – who apparently listens to theories cooked up by his uniquely unqualified son-in-law and fears being upstaged by Anthony Fauci – has still not understood that the longer amateur hour at the very top lasts, the more lives will be lost.

The lesson is not that professionalism should replace democratic politics, or, for that matter, widespread participation by citizens – a conclusion drawn by unashamedly elitist liberals who have sought to reinstate professional gatekeepers everywhere, but especially in primaries. Citizens still know best what their problems are; professionals – in perfectly non-condescending ways – play a crucial role in addressing them. Or, as John Dewey, the greatest American philosopher of democracy in the 20th century, put it, “no government by experts in which the masses do not have the chance to inform the experts as to their needs can be anything but an oligarchy managed in the interests of the few.”

“There is no functioning economy unless we control the virus.”But Trump has pinned his re-election hopes on soaring stock markets and record lows in unemployment. Now with stock markets in freefall and jobs set to follow, he seems determined to press ahead and try to relax restrictions on business in an attempt to cure the economic crisis.

Gould said some people were likely not to return to work even if ordered to do so. Secondly, she said, it was clear that state governors – who have shut down so many cities – would resist any move from Trump that could worsen the escalating health crisis.Even in normal times, such a conflict would create a constitutional crisis. In the current situation it could be much worse.

Public health experts, including the senior official Dr Anthony Fauci, have said Americans will need to adhere to physical distancing restrictions for at least several more weeks to stop the spread of the virus.Such chaos would only exacerbate the problems in the wider economy. Stock markets have fallen even as the Federal Reserve pumps billions into the economy, interest rates are cut and the government works on a bailout plan that could end up costing close to $2tn.

Nevertheless, the short-term temptation for Trump to try and push for a return to a normal may prove insurmountable. Not least because as the economic crisis deepens it is clear that his administration made fundamental errors that have exacerbated the situation.Covid-19 can’t be blamed on Trump, but moves he made before the crisis and after it began have substantially worsened the situation – and with it the economy.

No matter how you view it, Greenberger argues, the fact is that the US was woefully unprepared for a pandemic that security agencies had reportedly recently warned it about. Trump has disputed those claims, but there is no disputing that shortly after Covid-19 hit the US it became clear the country was ill equipped to deal with it. Frontline health workers are begging for supplies.

“With great regret I am noticing that we are in the process of completely gambling away the head start that we had,” Drosten said.

“In the handling of the corona epidemic, the chancellor is on the verge of unlawfully assuming a higher authority,”

Christian Drosten, the director of the Institute for Virology at Charité hospital in Berlin and a leading expert on coronaviruses, said in his daily podcast that reopening shopping centres and larger stores could trigger a second wave of the pandemic in May and June.

“A large part of the population has not realised the extent of the situation,” Brinkmann told Der Spiegel. “At the moment people see that some measures are being relaxed, conveying the impression that the entire lockdown will be lifted step by step and we can soon return to living as normal.”

“We are still at the beginning of the pandemic, many forget that,” Brinkmann said.