"I’m a capitalist, and even I think capitalism is broken,” said Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater, one of the largest private investment funds in the world. According to Forbes, Dalio ranks 60th on the list of richest people on the planet. “I believe that all good things taken to an extreme become self-destructive and that everything
Long ago, I was captivated by a seductively intuitive idea, one many of my wealthy friends still subscribe to: that both poverty and rising inequality are largely consequences of America’s failing education system. Fix that, I believed, and we could cure much of what ails America. This belief system, which I have come to think
In most rich countries, inequality is rising, and has been rising for some time. Many people believe this is a problem, but, equally, many think there’s not much we can do about it. After all, the argument goes, globalisation and new technology have created an economy in which those with highly valued skills or talents
Billionaire tech entrepreneur Mark Cuban has proposed a solution for income inequality that doesn’t involve dismantling capitalism: Business owners should give all their employees equity. “The biggest issue for entrepreneurs, for capitalists, for those of us who are successful is, if someone is only going to be paid by the hour...they’re always going to fall behind,” Cuban
In American politics, the issue of income inequality comes up frequently. As wealth continues to concentrate at the top – now the wealthiest 10% of American households control nearly 75% of household net worth – the middle continues to shrink, and some previously thriving metro areas have been hard hit by extreme poverty. But income
Microfinance was once applauded as the world’s most powerful tool for eliminating poverty. But it is now on a slippery slope, moving from good to bad. Microfinance is facing trouble because the purity of its mission has been diluted. When it started, microfinance was a financial tool being used for social good. Now it has
Something is very wrong in the United States and the United Kingdom, renowned epidemiologist Sir Michael Marmot told a standing room-only audience at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. While the rich continue to enjoy good health and longer lives, he said, the poor are getting sicker and dying younger. In Baltimore, Md., for
Over the past half-century, climate change has been blamed for heat waves, flooding, and rising seas. Now, researchers say warmer temperatures are widening the chasm separating richer and poorer countries, effectively boosting the economies of many wealthy polluters while dampening growth in much of the developing world. As a result, inequality between the haves and
In New York City, home to our nation’s financial markets, a staggering 74 percent of its students are considered economically disadvantaged. They are parallel worlds, a few miles apart and largely invisible to one another. This is an increasing challenge across our country: How do we build a path to economic mobility for more of
The recent college admissions scandal, which continues to captivate the nation’s attention, has laid bare the issues that have festered at the heart of college admissions for many years. The government’s indictment of parents who illegally manipulated their children’s applications makes clear how wealthy parents obsess on the prestige of certain colleges. It appears that implicated
The two gravest challenges facing America today, economic inequality and geographic divides, are increasingly intertwined. Economic inequality has surged with nearly all the growth being captured by the 1 percent, and the economic fortunes of coastal superstar cities and the rest of the nation have dramatically diverged. These two trends are fundamental to a new study by
FROM THE AIR, drone photography exposes the economic divide within cities. Roads, canals, and fences become barriers that split the land separating the rich and poor. Stark images from Johnny Miller’s series “Unequal Scenes” highlight the uneven development of cities. Makeshift shacks butt against developments in Mumbai. Lots sit empty in Detroit while an adjoining neighborhood
If the college cheating scandal has reinforced anything, it’s that one of the primary advantages of being wealthy is that the wealthy can buy more advantages. This helps explain why African Americans, who’ve historically been denied wealth, lag in almost every category of society behind whites, who have long benefited from capital extracted from black labor and culture.
It's nearly impossible to read the news these days without running across mentions of economic inequality. In recent months, politicians have debated the merits of raising marginal tax rates on the wealthy, a move proponents say could reduce economic inequalities. Likewise, economic inequality takes center stage when columnists discuss the extreme riches of some of today's business
Conventional seat belts do not fit pregnant women properly and motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of fetal death related to maternal trauma. Analyses of sex differences have led to the development of pregnant crash test dummies that enhance safety in automobile testing and design. In medicine, osteoporosis has been conceptualized primarily as a
In 2008, economist Harry Holzer estimated that child poverty was costing the United States more than $500 billion annually, because of increased health-care costs and criminal-justice expenditures, along with lost economic productivity when children in poverty reach adulthood. No one disputed the findings, but there was no groundswell of support for a legislative response, either. In
Market concentration, the economist’s term for how much an industry is dominated by one or a few firms, touches ever more aspects of American life. From the obvious (the Amazons and Walmarts of the retail economy) to the obscure (the beer industry, which may appear diverse, is dominated by two firms), market concentration has increased
The 2018 Environmental Performance Indicators and the 2018 Global Climate Risk Index together make a distressing argument: that India’s ‘environmental performance’ is the third worst among 180 countries even as it is the 14th most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Many of these effects have already assailed different parts of the country, including heavy rains,
Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates said Sunday that excellent basic health care that would prevent easily treatable but deadly conditions was achievable even in Africa’s poorest nations. “The good news about health is that by spending modest amounts on the prioritized areas, you can get phenomenal benefits,” he told AFP on the sidelines of the African
We are in an era of progress paradoxes. Unprecedented gains in technological innovation, poverty reduction, and life expectancy around the world coexist with persistent poverty traps in the poorest countries and increasing inequality and anomie in some of the wealthiest ones. In the U.S., one of the wealthiest countries, we see booming stock markets and
