Companies are becoming adept at identifying wealthy customers and marketing to them, creating a money-based caste system.
.. Emmanuel Saez, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, estimates that the top 1 percent of American households now controls 42 percent of the nation’s wealth, up from less than 30 percent two decades ago. The top 0.1 percent accounts for 22 percent, nearly double the 1995 proportion.
.. Late last year, officials in Los Angeles approved plans to build a separate terminal at LAX to serve celebrities or anyone else willing to pay $1,800 to skip the traffic jams and lines.
.. And with the rise of the Internet and Big Data, companies can pinpoint and favor these wealthiest customers in ways unimaginable even a decade ago. “At the high end, we can get into real psychographics and know who spends more time at the concierge or goes skiing in February,” said Bjorn Hanson, who teaches courses on tourism and hospitality management at New York University.
.. For companies trying to entice moneyed customers, that means identifying and anticipating what they want. “The premium customer doesn’t want to be asked questions,” said Mr. Clarke of PricewaterhouseCoopers. “They don’t want friction. They want things to happen through osmosis
.. “It’s the American way,” said Michael Bayley, president of Royal Caribbean. “I think society is prepared to accept that if you pay more for certain elements, then you deserve them.”
.. “The idea of segregating people into a class system is un-American. But if you live on Central Park, you are going to pay more. That’s how the system works.”
.. “They are looking for constant validation that they are a higher-value customer,” he said. For example, room service requests from Royal Suite occupants are automatically routed to a number different from the one used by regular passengers, who get slower, less personalized service.
The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans
Nearly half of Americans would have trouble finding $400 to pay for an emergency. I’m one of them.
The Fed asked respondents how they would pay for a $400 emergency. The answer: 47 percent of respondents said that either they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling something, or they would not be able to come up with the $400 at all.
.. “You are more likely to hear from your buddy that he is on Viagra than that he has credit-card problems,” says Brad Klontz, a financial psychologist
.. Part of the reason I hadn’t known is that until fairly recently, economists also didn’t know, or, at the very least, didn’t discuss it. They had unemployment statistics and income differentials and data on net worth, but none of these captured what was happening in households trying to make a go of it week to week, paycheck to paycheck, expense to expense.
.. So if you really want to know why there is such deep economic discontent in America today, even when many indicators say the country is heading in the right direction, ask a member of that 47 percent.
.. A 2014 Bankrate survey, echoing the Fed’s data, found that only 38 percent of Americans would cover a $1,000 emergency-room visit or $500 car repair with money they’d saved.
.. There isn’t much net worth to draw on. Median net worth has declined steeply in the past generation—down 85.3 percent from 1983 to 2013 for the bottom income quintile, down 63.5 percent for the second-lowest quintile, and down 25.8 percent for the third, or middle, quintile.
.. A family in the middle quintile, with an average income of roughly $50,000, could continue its spending for … six days. Even in the second-highest quintile, a family could maintain its normal consumption for only 5.3 months.
.. the study by Lusardi, Tufano, and Schneider found that nearly one-quarter of households making $100,000 to $150,000 a year claim not to be able to raise $2,000 in a month.
.. That effectively let big national banks issue credit cards everywhere at whatever interest rates they wanted to charge, and it gave the banks a huge incentive to target vulnerable consumers just the way, Emmons believes, vulnerable homeowners were targeted by subprime-mortgage lenders years later.
.. With the rise of credit, in particular, many Americans didn’t feel as much need to save.
.. The personal savings rate peaked at 13.3 percent in 1971 before falling to 2.6 percent in 2005. As of last year, the figure stood at 5.1 percent, and according to McClary, nearly 30 percent of American adults don’t save any of their income for retirement.
.. in general, the more sophisticated a country’s credit and financial markets, the worse the problem of financial insecurity for its citizens.
.. I never wanted to keep up with the Joneses. But, like many Americans, I wanted my children to keep up with the Joneses’ children, because I knew how easily my girls could be marginalized in a society where nearly all the rewards go to a small, well-educated elite.
.. and because—another choice—we believed they had earned the right to attend good universities, universities of their choice, we found ourselves in a financial vortex. (I am not saying that universities are extortionists, but … universities are extortionists.
.. I was making exactly what I had made 20 years earlier. And I wasn’t alone. Real hourly wages—that is, wage rates adjusted for inflation—peaked in 1972; since then, the average hourly wage has essentially been flat. (These figures do not include the value of benefits, which has increased.)
.. In a 2010 report titled “Middle Class in America,” the U.S. Commerce Department defined that class less by its position on the economic scale than by its aspirations: homeownership, a car for each adult, health security, a college education for each child, retirement security, and a family vacation each year.
.. A 2014 analysis by USA Today concluded that the American dream, defined by factors that generally corresponded to the Commerce Department’s middle-class benchmarks, would require an income of just more than $130,000 a year for an average family of four.
.. A 2014New York Times poll found that only 64 percent of Americans said they believed in the American dream
.. I suspect our sense of impotence in the face of financial difficulty is not only a source of disillusionment, but also a source of the anger that now infects our national politics, an anger that gets displaced onto undocumented immigrants or Chinese trade or President Obama precisely because we are unable or unwilling to articulate its true source.
Barney Rosset, The Art of Publishing
We prepared very carefully. We decided the best thing to do was send the book through the mail so it would be seized by the post office. We thought this would be the best way to defend the book. The post office is a federal government agency, and if they arrest you, you go to the federal court. That way you don’t have to defend the book in some small town. If we won against the post office, then the federal government was declaring that this book was not objectionable. That was the idea, and it worked out in exactly that way. The post office has its own special court, where the judge and the prosecutor are the same man. We brought in all these famous writers. Malcolm Cowley was a witness. He was particularly good because he was deaf and couldn’t hear the questions of the prosecutor—so he gave a lecture.
.. The judge, if you could call him that, ruled against us. We lost. Even so, I felt a great wave of sympathy coming from him, the way he stated things and the fact that he let us put all this evidence into the record. Getting things into the record was really important, because the judge who rules on the appeal only looks at what’s in the record. No new evidence is allowed.
.. In Brooklyn they came after me, the publisher, and charged me with conspiracy. They claimed that Henry Miller and I conspired to have him writeTropic of Cancer—that I commissioned him to write it in Brooklyn in 1933! That was a mistake, right? I would have been ten years old, and anyway he wrote the book in Paris. It was insane.
.. Now people come to Paris to buy the book, and they bring it back, and each book that gets into the United States is read by fifty people. What happens if you publish it and we actually win the case? In five years they’ll assign it in college courses and no one will want to read it!
.. His wife told me, When he gets here he’s not going to be friendly about this. I think you should publish it, but I will pretend I’m against it, because anything I say, he disagrees with me.
.. Science fiction or wandering between the centuries never appealed to me. But I tell you, if I knew how it was going to sell, I would have bought it. And if I knew how Tolkien, who was offered to me, was going to sell, you better believe I’d have published it. But I couldn’t understand a word of it. I mean, I didn’t object to it. It wasn’t like it was a fascist tract.
.. We were forewarned that Genet was a kleptomaniac. That night Loly was wearing very lovely earrings. We ate at a restaurant at the top of Montmartre, and Genet took us to the window. He said, Can you see the view, and all the things going on down there? The whole time Loly has her hands over her ears because Genet was trying to get the earrings off! But not a word was spoken about it. Jean Genet was a thief, but he was a real thief. He was a thief from the inside out. Like Sartre said, he was a saintly thief.
.. Do you think that it’s possible for a young publisher to do something like Grove again today?
ROSSET
In terms of editorial judgment, yes. If you had enough money. I told a friend the other night that if you want to be a publisher, you should inherit a lot of money. If you don’t inherit it, then you should marry a very rich girl. Preferably both! If you don’t have either, forget it. That’s the history of good American publishing.
The Politics of Backlash
“People want to be heard. They want to believe their voices matter. A January 2016 survey by the Rand Corporation reported that Republican primary voters are 86.5 percent more likely to favor Donald Trump if they ‘somewhat agree or ‘strongly agree’ with the statement, ‘People like me don’t have any say about what the government does.”’
.. The similarities between American and European politics are greater now than in many years because societies on both sides of the Atlantic face similar dilemmas. Sanders, Corbyn and Tsipras; Trump and Le Pen: The parallels are striking.
.. in recent decades the bottom third of the world’s population have gained “with many of them escaping destitution.” The middle third become richer, while the “top 1 percent, and to a lesser extent the top 5 percent, have gained significantly.” The losers have been the 20 percent below that top swathe, with stagnant real incomes or minimal gains. “They represent the working class in the United States and other advanced countries.”