In March, for instance, Paul Tudor Jones II, the private equity investor, gave a TED talk in which he proclaimed that the divide between the top 1 percent in the United States and the remainder of the country “cannot and will not persist.” Mr. Jones, who is thought to be worth nearly $5 billion, added that such divides have historically been resolved in one of three ways: taxes, wars or revolution.
.. And in June, Nick Hanauer, a tech billionaire from Seattle, wrote a blog post laying out the capitalist’s case for a $15 minimum wage. The post echoed sentiments that Mr. Hanauer made in a separate polemic he wrotelast summer for Politico, in which he addressed himself directly to the planet’s “zillionaires” and said: “I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.”
The American Dream Is Suffering, but Americans are Satisfied: 15 Charts
Penn Schoen Berland surveyed 2,000 respondents. Many of the results below break out responses between the general population and “broad elites,” a category defined as individuals with a college degree and a minimum income of $75,000, who are engaged with politics and technology.
The American Dream: Personal Optimists, National Pessimists
Seventy-seven percent of Millennials say they’re living the dream or believe they can; among African Americans and Asian Americans, that number rises to 82 percent. Among Latinos, it’s 83 percent.
.. First, the Millennial Generation—for all the talk about it wanting to do good in the world—shows signs of being another “Me Generation.” Respondents 30 and under were the only age group to name as the top element of their dream job: “pays a lot of money.” Whereas 22 percent of respondents 65+ and 19 percent of those 51-64 said “helping others” was most important to their personal American Dream, only 14 percent of Millennials did.
.. A second emerging insight is that Americans 51-64, especially white Americans of that age, are feeling more negative than any other age group. Only 63 percent of that group thinks they are living the dream or still will, compared to at least 73 percent for every other age group.
.. Nearly two-thirds agree with the statement “As long as I am able to provide the life I want for myself and my family, it doesn’t matter if others are substantially wealthier than [I]”—compared to only 36 percent who say, “The concentration of wealth and privilege within the top one percent of American society is a problem.”
Peter Thiel Compares Elite Education to a Night Club With a Long Line
Tech investor Peter Thiel, who founded PayPal, told an Aspen Ideas Festival crowd Wednesday that while highly regarded institutions of higher education claim to benefit society as a whole, the ultimate worth of the degrees they confer is actually inextricably tied to deliberate, ruthlessly enforced exclusivity.
If you were the president of Harvard or Stanford and you wanted to get a lynch mob of students, alumni, and faculty to come after you, what you should say is something like this: We live in this much larger, more global world. We offer this great education to everybody. So we’re going to double or triple our enrollment over the next 15 to 20 years. And people would all be furious, because the value of the degree comes from massive exclusion. And what you’re really running is something like a Studio 54 night club that’s got an incredibly long line outside and a very small number of people let inside. It’s branded as positive sum, everybody can learn, but the reality is that it is deeply zero sum.