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“Both Republicans and many Democrats have experienced an ideological shift toward acceptance of a form of free market capitalism which, among other characteristics, offers less support for government provision of transfers, lower marginal tax rates for those with high incomes, and deregulation of a number of industries,

Between 1982 and 2012, the Republican share of contributions from the Forbes 400 has been steadily falling, to 59 percent from 68 percent. As membership in the Forbes 400 changes, this trend will accelerate

the share of contributions to Democrats from the top 0.01 percent of adults — a much larger share of the population than the Forbes 400 list — has grown from about 7 percent of total campaign contributions in 1980 to more than 25 percent of contributions in 2012. The same pattern is visible among Republicans, where the growth of fundraising dependence on the superrich has been moving along the same trajectory.

upscale voters were just as important to the Obama coalition as downscale voters. One consequence of the increased importance of the affluent to Democrats, according to Bonica and the three co-authors on the inequality paper, is that the Democratic Party has in many respects become the party of deregulated markets.

“The Democratic Party pushed through the financial regulation of the 1930s, while the Democratic party of the 1990s undid much of this regulation in its embrace of unregulated financial capitalism,” the four authors write.

Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, political scientists at Princeton and Northwestern. In a 2014 essay, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” they analyze congressional voting patterns and conclude thatThe majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose.

“These findings may be disappointing to those who look to the Democratic Party as the ally of the disadvantaged,” Gilens wrote in a 2012 essay published by the Boston Review:In some respects Democrats have in fact served this function in the social welfare domain. But in other domains, policies adopted under Democratic control are no more consistent with the preferences of the less well off than are those adopted during periods dominated by the Republican Party.

Gilens, in a forthcoming paper in Perspectives on Politics, is critical of both Democrats and Republicans:On important aspects of tax policy, trade policy, and government regulation, both political parties have embraced an agenda over the past few decades that coincides far more with the economically regressive, free trade, and deregulatory orientations of the affluent than with the preferences of the middle class.

Most important, in recent years, the Democratic Party has become the political home for those whose most passionate cause is cultural, as opposed to economic, liberalism: decriminalization of drug possession; women’s rights; the rights of criminal defendants; and rights associated with the sexual revolution, including transgender rights, the right to contraception, abortion and same-sex marriage.

the party, if its aim is to mobilize those on the bottom rungs of the ladder, whites as well as blacks and Hispanics, will face some bitter conflicts, because these target voters are often the most hostile to the left-leaning social rights agenda.

College graduates were 22.9 percentage points more liberal on homosexuality than those without high school degrees, and 24.8 percentage points more liberal in their views on gay marriage.The same class differences have been found in views on abortion, school prayer and the survey question: should women should be the equal of men.

For many black and Hispanic voters who hold conservative views on social issues, the Democratic Party’s commitment on civil rights, immigration reform and the safety net trumps any hesitation about voting for Democratic candidates who hold alien cultural and moral views.

The same is not true for noncollege whites. Many of these voters hold liberal economic views, as evidenced by the passage by large margins of minimum wage referendums in four solidly red states last year. In the case of these white voters, however, animosity to Democratic cultural and moral liberalism trumps Democratic economic liberalism, as demonstrated by the near unanimous Republican-majority midterm and presidential voting in the poorest white counties of Appalachia.

The practical reality is that the Democratic Party is now structurally disengaged from class-based populism, especially a form of economically redistributive populism that low-to-moderate-income whites would find inviting.

But regardless of industry, the families investing the most in presidential politics overwhelmingly lean right, contributing tens of millions of dollars to support Republican candidates who have pledged to pare regulations; cut taxes on income, capital gains and inheritances; and shrink entitlement programs.

In marshaling their financial resources chiefly behind Republican candidates, the donors are also serving as a kind of financial check on demographic forces that have been nudging the electorate toward support for the Democratic Party and its economic policies. Two-thirds of Americans support higher taxes on those earning $1 million or more a year, according to a June New York Times/CBS News poll, while six in 10 favor more government intervention to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly seven in 10 favor preserving Social Security and Medicare benefits as they are.

The donor families’ wealth reflects, in part, the vast growth of the financial-services sector and the boom in oil and gas, which have helped transform the American economy in recent decades. They are also the beneficiaries of political and economic forces that are driving widening inequality: As the share of national wealth and income going to the middle class has shrunk, these families are among those whose share has grown.

Most of the families are clustered around just nine cities. Many are neighbors, living near one another in neighborhoods like Bel Air and Brentwood in Los Angeles; River Oaks, a Houston community popular with energy executives; or Indian Creek Village, a private island near Miami that has a private security force and just 35 homes lining an 18-hole golf course.

More than 50 members of these families have made the Forbes 400 list of the country’s top billionaires, marking a scale of wealth against which even a million-dollar political contribution can seem relatively small. The Chicago hedge fund billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin, for example, earns about $68.5 million a month after taxes, according to court filings made by his wife in their divorce. He has given a total of $300,000 to groups backing Republican presidential candidates. That is a huge sum on its face, yet is the equivalent of only $21.17 for a typical American household, according to Congressional Budget Office data on after-tax income.

“The campaign finance system is now a countervailing force to the way the actual voters of the country are evolving and the policies they want,” said Ruy Teixeira, a political and demographic expert at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

The accumulation of wealth has been particularly rapid at the elite levels of Wall Street, where financiers who once managed other people’s capital now, increasingly, own it themselves. Since 1979, according to one study, the one-tenth of 1 percent of American taxpayers who work in finance have roughly quintupled their share of the country’s income. Sixty-four of the families made their wealth in finance, the largest single faction among the super-donors of 2016.

instead of working their way up to the executive suite at Goldman Sachs or Exxon, most of these donors set out on their own, establishing privately held firms controlled individually or with partners. In finance, they started hedge funds, or formed private equity and venture capital firms, benefiting from favorable tax treatment of debt and capital gains, and more recently from a rising stock market and low interest rates

In energy, some were latter-day wildcatters, early to capitalize on the new drilling technologies and high energy prices that made it economical to exploit shale formations in North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas. Others made fortunes supplying those wildcatters with pipelines, trucks and equipment for “fracking.”

The families who give do so, to some extent, because of personal, regional and professional ties to the candidates. Jeb Bush’s father made money in the oil business, while Mr. Bush himself earned millions of dollars on Wall Street. Some of the candidates most popular among ultrawealthy donors have also served in elected office in Florida and Texas, two states that are home to many of the affluent families on the list.

the giving, more broadly, reflects the political stakes this year for the families and businesses that have moved most aggressively to take advantage of Citizens United, particularly in the energy and finance industries.

The Obama administration, Democrats in Congress and even Mr. Bush have argued for tax and regulatory shifts that could subject many venture capital and private equity firms to higher levels of corporate or investment taxation. Hedge funds, which historically were lightly regulated, are bound by new rules with the Dodd-Frank regulations, which several Republican candidates have pledged to roll back and which Mrs. Clinton has pledged to defend.

And while the shale boom has generated new fortunes, it has also produced a glut of oil that is now driving down prices. Most in the industry favor lifting the 40-year-old ban on exporting oi

The share of podcasts in Americans’ diet of audio programming grew by 18 percent from 2014 to 2015, according to Edison. People who listen to podcasts daily spend about two hours a day, on average, with podcasts, a larger share than for any other form of audio, Edison reported

For Gimlet, listeners’ willingness to try new podcasts has translated into instant audiences for its newest shows. “Startup,” the company’s first show, took 30 days to reach 100,000 listeners a week. Its weekly audience is now more than 500,000. “Mystery Show” took four days to reach 100,000 listeners, mainly because it was being promoted by Gimlet’s two other shows. By its fourth episode, its audience was about 250,000 weekly listens.

Several advertisers told me that podcast ads had proved to be tremendously effective. They can’t be easily skipped, and because they are often read by hosts, audiences are often convinced of their authenticity. “We feel it creates a deep personal connection to our brand,”

Podcasting is destined to be huge, both as a medium and a business. “It’s the future of radio,” Mr. Turck of Panoply said. Just don’t expect that future to come tomorrow.

Similarly, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, was ostracized in 2005 for wondering publicly whether the preponderance of male professors in some top math and science departments might be due partly to the larger variance in I.Q. scores among men (meaning there are more men at the very high and very low ends). “This was not a permissible hypothesis,” Dr. Haidt said. “It blamed the victims rather than the powerful. The outrage ultimately led to his resignation. We psychologists should have been outraged by the outrage. We should have defended his right to think freely.” Instead, the taboo against discussing sex differences was reinforced, so universities and the National Science Foundation went on spending tens of millions of dollars on research and programs based on the assumption that female scientists faced discrimination and various forms of unconscious bias. But that assumption has been repeatedly contradicted, most recently in a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by two Cornell psychologists, Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams. After reviewing two decades of research, they report that a woman in academic science typically fares as well as, if not better than, a comparable man when it comes to being interviewed, hired, promoted, financed and published.

Dr. Haidt was optimistic enough to title his speech “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology,” urging his colleagues to focus on shared science rather than shared moral values. To overcome taboos, he advised them to subscribe to National Review and to read Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions.”

the really weird part of Hillary Clinton’s claim that America must “get back to telling” the story of how great we are “to ourselves” is how much it echoes the right’s attack on Obama. Since Obama took office, a parade of conservative politicians and pundits have accused him of insufficient faith in America’s greatness. Mitt Romney entitled his campaign book No Apology: Believe in America. In 2013, Dick Cheney declared, “I don’t think that Barack Obama believes in the U.S. as an exceptional nation.”

The problem isn’t that Bush didn’t tell foreigners about all the good America was doing. It’s that in their eyes, Bush’s behavior massively contradicted his rhetoric

Shares of Morgan Stanley (MS.N) slid 6.9 percent in their largest one-day drop since November 2012, while rival Goldman Sachs (GS.N) fell 4.6 percent. Both closed at their lowest since 2013.

Facebook Inc (FB.O), Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) and other technology stocks that had lent strength to the market last year extended their decline from Friday. Fund managers said last year's outsized gains among some Internet stocks made them the first choice to sell now.

The Dow Jones industrial average .DJI closed down 177.92 points, or 1.1 percent, at 16,027.05, the S&P 500 .SPX lost 26.61 points, or 1.42 percent, to end at 1,853.44 and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC dropped 79.39 points, or 1.82 percent, to 4,283.75.

Falling oil prices along with concern over a worsening global growth outlook have caused a sharp selloff in stocks this year. Investors have been searching for a catalyst that might change the market's course.

Adding to recent woes for the tech sector, Cognizant (CTSH.O) dropped 7.7 percent to $54.05 after the IT services provider issued a weak sales forecast. Amazon fell 2.8 percent while Facebook dropped 4.2 percent

Declining issues outnumbered advancing ones on the NYSE by 2,484 to 618; on the Nasdaq, 2,029 issues fell and 804 advanced. The S&P 500 posted 7 new 52-week highs and 97 new lows; the Nasdaq recorded 4 new highs and 495 new lows.

When the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944 some 424,000 Jews were deported to the Auschwitz death camp, where nearly all of them died.

The Jewish population of Hungary is estimated today at 35,000-120,000, the World Jewish Congress says. The higher estimate is the figure given by the Hungarian Jewish organisation Mazsihisz.

Establishing a precise figure is difficult because definitions of Jewish identity differ and many Hungarian Jews are married to non-Jews.

were killed in the clashes, along with at least nine militants, the defence ministry said.

Correspondents say the attack is a huge security failure because the attackers were able to smuggle weapons into an area supposed to have been made secure by the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF).

Afghan Foreign Minister Salahuddin Rabbani, speaking at the conference, called on Pakistan to help restart stalled peace talks with the Taliban.

Witnesses reported that some of the militants took families hostage and used them as human shields. They said they could hear Afghan soldiers calling on the fighters to let the women and children go.

Separately, the Taliban claimed to have captured Khanashin district in southern Helmand province. A local official confirmed the district had fallen.

Militant violence has increased across Afghanistan since the departure of most Nato and US forces last year.

The statement by the Taliban claimed that they had killed up to 80 soldiers. This figure could not be verified.

Afghan Taliban kill dozens at Kandahar airport

The attack continued until one gunman who had out on his own for several hours was killed late on Wednesday.

Russia 'now supports FSA'

In an update on Russian operations, Mr Putin said the military was now supporting Free Syrian Army (FSA) forces.

That includes "contacts to ensure flight safety with the Israeli air force HQ and the US-led coalition forces," he said.

Syrian opposition politicians meeting in the Saudi capital Riyadh have also agreed a statement to guide peace talks with the government.

In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Shkreli said he was confident that he would be cleared of all charges.

Mr. Shkreli has emerged as a symbol of pharmaceutical greed for acquiring a decades-old drug used to treat an infection that can be devastating for babies and people with AIDS and, overnight, raising the price to $750 a pill from $13.50. His only mistake, he later conceded, was not raising the price more.

Those price increases combined with Mr. Shkreli’s jeering response to his critics has made him a lightning rod for public outrage and fodder for the presidential campaign. His company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, and others, like Valeant Pharmaceuticals, have come under fire from lawmakers and consumers for profiting from steep price increases for old drugs.

But the criminal charges brought against him actually relate to something else entirely — his time as a hedge fund manager and when he ran his first biopharmaceutical company, Retrophin.

Still, for many of his critics, Mr. Shkreli’s arrest was a comeuppance for the brash executive who has seemed to enjoy — relish, even — his public notoriety. On Thursday, a satirical New Yorker column by the humorist Andy Borowitz said Mr. Shkreli’s lawyers had informed their client their hourly legal fees had increased by 5,000 percent.

School attacks are rare in Sweden - with just one incident on record in the past 20 years, in which one pupil was shot dead.

Since taking power, Mr Ouattara has overseen an economic boom but been accused of ignoring atrocities allegedly committed by his supporters, while prosecuting his rivals.

ran has always maintained its nuclear programme is peaceful, but opponents of the deal say it does not do enough to ensure the country cannot develop a nuclear bomb.

Since then, BBC Iraq correspondent Ahmed Maher says, there has been no claim of responsibility and the fate of those kidnapped remains unknown - a sign of how secretive and complicated the negotiation process is.

The modern GE was built by Jack Welch, the youngest CEO and chairman in company history when he took over in 1981. He ran it for 20 years, becoming the rare CEO who was also a household name, praised for his strategic and operational mastery.

their most obvious problem. GE couldn’t live without GE Capital, still so big it was essentially the nation’s seventh largest bank. But investors couldn’t live with GE Capital and its unshakable shadow of risk, either.

it worked more like a collection of businesses under the protection of a giant bank. As the financial sector came to drive more of the U.S. economy, GE Capital, the company’s finance arm, powered more of the company’s growth. At its height, Capital accounted for more than half of GE’s profits. It rivaled the biggest banks in the country, competed with Wall Street for the brightest M.B.A.s and employed hundreds of bankers.

The industrial spine of the company gave GE a AAA credit rating that allowed it to borrow money inexpensively, giving it an advantage over banks, which relied on deposits. The cash flowed up to headquarters where it powered the development of new jet engines and dividends for shareholders.

Capital also gave General Electric’s chief executives a handy, deep bucket of financial spackle with which to smooth over the cracks in quarterly earnings reports and keep Wall Street happy

GE shares were trading at 40 times its earnings when Welch retired in 2001, more than double where it had historically. And much of those profits were coming from deep within Capital, not the company’s factories.

When the financial crisis hit, Capital fell back to earth, taking GE’s share price and Immelt with it. The stock closed as low as $6.66 in March 2009. General Electric was on the brink of collapse. The market for short-term loans, the lifeblood of GE Capital, had frozen, and there was little in the way of deposits to fall back on. The Federal Reserve stepped in to save it after an emergency plea from Immelt.

the near-death experience taught investors to think of GE like a bank, a stock always vulnerable to another financial collapse

At its peak, General Electric was the most valuable company in the U.S., worth nearly $600 billion in August 2000. That year, GE’s third of a million employees operated 150 factories in the U.S., and another 176 in 34 other countries. Its pension plan covered 485,000 people.

What if the GE Jack Welch built didn’t work any more?

Cracks in the performance of the company’s industrial lines—its power turbines, jet engines, locomotives and MRI machines—would now be plain to see, some executives worried, without Capital’s cash to help cover the weak quarters and pay the sacrosanct dividend

Most of the shortfall came from its service contracts, which should have been the source of the easiest profits. Instead, the heart of the industrial business was hollow. And its failure was about to tip the entire company into crisis.

Former colleagues compared him to Bill Clinton because of his magnetic ability to hold the focus of a room. He sounded like a leader. He was a natural salesman.

Immelt was so confident in GE’s managerial excellence that he projected a sunny vision for the company’s future that didn’t always match reality. He was aware of the challenges, but he wanted his people to feel like they were playing for a winning team. That often left Immelt, in the words of one GE insider, trying to market himself out of a math problem.

Alstom’s problems hadn’t gone away, but now its stock was cheaper, and Immelt saw the makings of a deal that fit perfectly with his vision for reshaping his company. GE would essentially swap Capital, the cash engine that no longer made sense, for a new one that could churn out profits each quarter in the reliable way that industrial companies were supposed to.

To the dismay of some involved, GE’s bid crept upward, from the €30 a share that the power division’s deal team already believed was too high, to roughly €34, or almost $47. Immelt and Kron met one-on-one, and the deal team realized the game was over. The principals had shaken hands.

The visions for the present and the future were both fundamentally flawed. As GE’s research department was preparing white papers heralding “The Age of Gas,” the world was entering a multiyear decline in the demand for new gas power plants and for the electricity that made them profitable.

When advisers determined that the concessions to get the deal approved might have grown costly enough to trigger a provision allowing GE to back out, some in the Power business quietly celebrated, confiding in one another that they assumed management would abandon the deal. But Immelt and his circle of closest advisers wanted it done. That included Steve Bolze, the man who ran it and hoped someday to run all of General Electric.

“Steve’s our guy,” McElhinney said in one meeting. If Bolze was elevated to CEO, those behind him in Power would rise too. “Get on board,” he said. “We have to make the numbers.”

Immelt, trapped in Welch’s long shadow, craved a bold move to shock his company out of the doldrums that had plagued his tenure. It was time for GE to be reinvented again.

In the dry language of accounting in which he was so fluent, Flannery was declaring a pillar of Immelt’s pivot had failed: GE had been sending money out the door to repurchase its stock and pay dividends but wasn’t bringing in enough from its regular operations to cover them. It wasn’t sustainable. Buybacks and dividends are generally paid out of leftover funds.

when GE spun off Genworth, there was a chunk of the business, long-term-care insurance, that lingered. Policies designed to cover expenses like nursing homes and assisted living had proved to be a disaster for insurers who had drastically underestimated the costs

The bankers didn’t think the long-term-care business could be part of the Genworth spinoff. To make the deal more attractive, GE agreed to cover any losses. This insurance for insurers covered about 300,000 policies by early 2018, about 4% of all such policies written in the country. Incoming premiums weren’t covering payouts.

Two months after Miller flagged the $3 billion, it was clear the problem was a great deal larger. GE was preparing for it to be more than $6 billion and needed to come up with $15 billion in reserves regulators required it to have to cover possible costs in the future. The figure was gigantic. By comparison, even after the recent cut, GE’s annual dividend cost $4 billion.

JP Morgan analyst Steve Tusa, who led the pack in arguing that GE was harboring serious problems, removed his sell rating on the stock this week. GE’s biggest skeptic still thinks the businesses are broken but the risks are now known. The stock climbed back above $7 on Thursday, but is down more than 50% for the year and nearly 90% from its 2000 zenith.

Business as usual is robbing people of hope, white-anting the promise of change

The message implicit in our governments’ refusal to act is that we should all just suck it up – as in “climate change is bullshit, and even if it’s not there’s nothing you can do about it”

It’s a licence for nihilism, a ticket to hell in a handbasket

the cohort responsible for this mixture of denial and fatalism is far removed from the daily experience of the ordinary citizen, especially the youngest and poorest of us. They have become a threat to our shared future and we must hold them to account, immediately and without reservation.

I’ve noticed a bruised attitude of beleaguerment in individuals and within groups that’s increasingly hard to ignore, a mounting grimness in the faces and language of people barely holding on in the face of steady, cumulative and unrelenting losses

some are clinging to the last tendrils of hope, others are falling into despair. And that worries me.

It’s expressed as grief, and the most palpable, widespread and immediate expression of it is now brewing over climate change. Beneath that grief there’s rage.

I worry that this widely-shared grief and unfocussed rage may become the signal human disposition of our time, that the Anthropocene will be marked by fury and hopelessness

Younger people in particular have begun to feel abandoned by their leaders and elders. They suspect they’ll be left without food or ammunition to stage a fighting retreat in which every battle is a defeat foreseen and every bit of territory was surrendered in advance by politicians and CEOs who deserted them long ago to hide in their privileged bunkers and silos

the reason humanity survived the cold war is because world leaders paid attention. They took emergent crises seriously. And in each instance of utmost danger, arguments of ideology and nationalism eventually fell away before the sacred importance of life itself

the four great capacities of humanity to solve a crisis – ingenuity, discipline, courage and sacrifice – these seem to be reserved for more important enterprises

Our governments and corporations are ensnared in a feedback loop of “common sense” and mutual self-preservation that’s little more than a bespoke form of nihilism. Ideology, prestige, assets and territory are now tacitly understood to be worth more than all life, human or otherwise

We can no longer wait patiently for our leaders to catch up. We cannot allow ourselves to be trained to accept hopelessness. Not by business, nor by governments. Both have subjected us to a steady diet of loss and depletion. It’s sapped us and left us mourning a future we can see fading before it even arrives

There’s no good reason to submit to this. No sane purpose in putting up with it. Because grief will paralyse us, and despair renders doom inevitable. We can afford neither.

we’ll need to get our house in order – and fast. That means calling bullshit on what’s been happening in our name for the past 15 years.

Life. It’s worth the fight. But, by God, after decades of appeasement, defeatism and denialism, it’s going to take a fight. Time’s short. So, let’s give our grief and fury some shape and purpose and reclaim our future together. Enough cowardice. Enough bullshit. Time for action.

The PRRI/Atlantic findings add to growing evidence that these institutions are becoming weaker—or, at the very least, more segregated by identity

Almost one in five of the survey respondents said their interactions with people of a different political party are negative

“As these other social identities have moved into alignment with partisanship, we’re seeing more animosity across partisan lines—not necessarily because we’re disagreeing about things, but because we believe the [person from the] other party is an outsider, socially and culturally, from us,”

“It also becomes really easy to dehumanize people who we don’t have identities in common with.” In recent decades, social scientists have seen increased use of the language of dehumanization, Mason said: people calling their political opponents monsters, animals, or demons, for example.

When asked how they would feel about their child marrying someone from the opposite political party, 45 percent of Democrats said they would be unhappy, compared with 35 percent of Republicans.

Perhaps more than any other, this was the fracture line that animated the 2016 election. Even the iconography, from the Trump campaign’s “Make America Great Again” trucker hats to the Clinton campaign’s forward-pointing “H” and “Stronger Together” slogan reflected this divide

a far greater number of Americans may have only cursory interactions with people unlike themselves.

Certain subgroups were more cloistered than others: 21 percent of Republicans said they seldom or never interact with people who don’t share their race, versus 13 percent of Democrats

Similarly, more than a quarter of white evangelicals said they rarely encounter people of a different race, slightly more than any other major religious group included in the survey.

among white people, education level made a huge difference: Those without a college degree were more than twice as likely as their college-educated peers to say they rarely encounter people of a different race, and more than four times as likely to say they seldom or never encounter people from a different religion or political party.

Many respondents pointed to political parties and the media as two major causes of all this discord, with stark differences along partisan lines: 85 percent of Republicans said the media is pulling the country apart, versus 54 percent of Democrats.

Americans today are sharply divided over the value of multiculturalism: In the survey, 54 percent of Democrats said they prefer the United States to be made up of people from a wide variety of religions, compared with 12 percent of Republicans. By contrast, 40 percent of Republicans said they’d prefer a nation mostly made up of Christians, compared with 14 percent of Democrats.

Roughly one out of five survey respondents reported that they seldom or never encounter people who don’t share their religion, and a similar proportion said the same for race.

“As certain groups reach a critical mass, I think it throws Americans as a whole back into a conversation about affirming these principles [of pluralism] or not,” he said. “If you think culture war today, it’s less about gay marriage and abortion than it is about American identity.”

When people largely surround themselves with sameness, they may find themselves left shouting across perceived divides, unable to see their reflection in anyone who stands on the other side.

Paying well obviously helps attract and retain staff, who might otherwise go to chains where the pace of work is slower. But it also serves to drive up wages across the industry, which, because of Aldi’s lower overall employee costs, hurts its competitors more.

Lacking capital, they stocked only a tight range of staples, such as pasta and soap, planning to widen the offering later. But they soon realised that offering a limited selection of cheap, fast-selling goods kept their costs down and the cash flowing, which they could use to invest in new stores. As the former Aldi executive Dieter Brandes and his son Nils wrote in “Bare Essentials”, their book about the company: “Basically, a completely new business model was created along the lines of a discovery in the natural sciences: by accident.”

in 1961, when they had 300 stores, they chose to split Aldi, short for Albrecht Discount, into two parts. The “Aldi equator” ran through Essen, with Theo taking the part of Germany to the north, and Karl the south. Aldi North and Aldi South shared all information, except profits, and conducted some supplier negotiations jointly, but were otherwise run separately, with their stores carrying different product ranges and featuring differently coloured floors – one yellow and one grey.

Theo continued to put in long hours at the office, managing even the smallest details in his quest to save money. He wore pencils down to the nubs and turned off the light when entering an office if he judged that his staff could see well enough without it. He once told his board to look at the thickness of the paper used for photocopies. Outside consultants and media interviews were banned, considered unnecessary expenditures or distractions. Asceticism was a virtue in life and business, he believed. “People live more on what they do not eat,” he once said. He wanted Aldi to be a place where “people who don’t hate their money can safely go shopping”

In their book “Bare Essentials”, Dieter and Nils Brandes argued that Aldi’s embrace of kaizen, its lean management structure and just-in-time approach to inventory – taking delivery of stock only when needed, to cut holding costs – made it the “most Japanese” company in Germany.

1976, Aldi South, Karl’s company, opened the first Aldi store on the east coast of the US. Three years later, in 1979, Theo’s Aldi North purchased Trader Joe’s, a California chain that sells cheap gourmet foods and enjoys a cult-like following. (The US is still the only foreign market where both Aldis operate.)

Second, the main chains – the big four as well as the leading “soft” discounter Kwik Save (which stocked a larger range than Aldi) – were listed on the stock exchange. The best way to fight Aldi early on is to slash prices, but few bosses of public companies are happy to accept lower profits, and thus lower bonuses, by pursuing long-term strategies

Fourth, and most importantly, the UK is, by global standards, a high-wage economy. This means that labour costs make up a big part of a supermarket’s operating expenses. Here, discounters have a major competitive advantage, because their business model – stocking a small range of products, eschewing delicatessens and promotions, and so on – allows them to operate with fewer, more productive, staff. (The most important performance measure in any Aldi branch is revenue divided by employee hours.)

arl Albrecht, who was famously secretive, only spoke publicly about Aldi’s business model on one occasion – in 1953. Its fundamental principles, he said, were “narrow product range and low price, [which] cannot be separated

As a private company, with no shareholders other than Karl Albrecht’s family to answer to, it could afford to be patient. “Aldi is very attuned to going into a country, making the investment, and building slowly and steadily,” said Richard Hyman, the retail expert. “Most other companies don’t have a 30-year view – or even a five-year view.”

By the time the supermarkets awoke to the structural shift that had occurred in the industry, the damage was done. “The big four bosses were not just sleeping at the wheel,” said Black. “They were comatose.”

“Ten years ago we had 900 lines, now we have 1,800,” said Neale. “That’s not because we are trying to become a big-four retailer, it’s because consumer tastes have evolved. We are managing the equilibrium between what customers want and costs.”

As the large supermarkets have realised, it is very hard to make money from internet sales because the profit margin on groceries is small and the delivery costs are so high – but now they can’t reverse course without losing customers. Andy Clarke, the former boss of Asda, told the Sunday Times last year that if the big four supermarkets had their time again “they wouldn’t have offered home deliveries, full stop”. “Online groceries are a cost drain,” Neale said. “Why should 90% of customers subsidise the 10% who get free home delivery?”

All supermarkets have their own private labels: made not by them, but for them, by manufacturers who agree to put their merchandise in a bag or box with the grocer’s logo on it. But Aldi takes this to extremes: more than 90% of the products it sells, from shaving cream to dark chocolate and frozen pizza, are private labels

Stocking mostly own-label goods allows the company to order huge quantities of a single item, to its own specifications, at a low unit cost.

Aldi’s entire ketchup order comes from one manufacturer that can operate the same, unchanging product run, all the time, and has no marketing costs to build into the price. “For many SKUs we are the biggest buyer by a country mile,” Neale said.

Among UK suppliers, who have often been treated badly by the big supermarkets, with their pressure for back margin fees and slow payment terms, Aldi has a good reputation

in 2010, following the death of Theo, which it said brought to an end “the story of the most eccentric, secretive and mysterious pair of siblings in Germany’s post-war economic history”. Karl died four years later, the richest man in Germany with a net worth of $25bn. (Second on the list was Dieter Schwarz, the Lidl owner, followed by Theo’s heirs.)

In 2017, Aldi South’s revenues reached €52bn, with about 20% of that from the UK and Ireland. In Ireland, Aldi has 12% of the market, and in Australia 13%, behind Woolworths and Coles. Its share in the US is only 2% – but Aldi plans to raise its number of outlets from 1,800 to 2,500 by 2022, which would make it the third-biggest chain in the US by store count, after Walmart and Kroger

In the UK there is still plenty of room to grow. Aldi hopes to have 1,000 shops in three years, up from just over 800 today. Dave McCarthy, a retail analyst at HSBC, said that given Aldi and Lidl’s expansion plans, their share of the market could peak at more than 20%.

Still, Graham was far more sympathetic towards civil rights than many other white Christian pastors of his generation, and he pushed for non-segregated crusades early in the 1950s. That legacy left him beloved across different groups of American Christians. “Our generation owes this giant of the Christian faith a debt of gratitude for paving the way for sharing the Gospel with the world with humility, graciousness, and integrity,” wrote Gabriel Salguero, the president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, in a statement on Wednesday.