Sultans of Swing
When two British lawyers, Faith Zaman and Thomas Derbyshire, signed on in 2004 to manage the affairs of Prince Jefri Bolkiah, notorious playboy brother of the Sultan of Brunei, they entered a world of orgiastic wealth: 250 companies, 2,000 cars, luxury hotels, planeloads of women and polo ponies, colossal diamonds.
http://rdd.me/iicruzmm
Plutocratic hocus-pocus
200 Countries, 200 Years
Hans Rosling tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers, all in just four minutes. Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Rosling shows how the world we live in is radically different from the world most of us imagine.
"We act against all evidence"
We are simply dramatically stupid. We act systematically against the evidence we have. We know everything that should not be done. There is nobody that does not know that. Particularly the big politicians know exactly what should not be done. Yet they do it. The more you have, the more greedy you become. And all this crisis is the product of greed. Greed is the dominant value today in the world. And as long as that persists, we are done. The United States is the most dramatic example. I have gone as far as saying that the United States is an "underdeveloping nation," which is a new category. We have developed, underdeveloped, and developing. Now you have underdeveloping. And the United States is an example, in which the one percent of the Americans are doing better and better and better, and the 99 percent is going down, in all sorts of manifestations.
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/9/22/chilean_economist_manfred_max_neef_us
The rich are greedy bastards
An interesting yet disheartening series of socioeconomic experiments shows that those on the lower-income levels are more likely to give and be charitable than their higher paid counterparts. The findings come from experiments carried out by UC Berkeley doctoral student Paul Piff and his team. A recent national survey in the US reiterates the results, revealing lower-income people give more of their hard-earned money to charity than the wealthy. At a time when the richest one percent of Americans own more than the bottom 90 percent combined, the findings are timely. "Our data suggests that an ironic and self-perpetuating dynamic may in part explain this trend," the researchers write. "Whereas lower-class individuals may give more of their resources away, upper-class individuals may tend to preserve and hold onto their wealth. This differential pattern could exacerbate economic inequality." Prior research done by Piff and his colleagues suggests lower income people might be more compassionate because they are more closely rooted to and dependent on others, therefore more empathetic. It is also thought that the more money the lower-earning people make in their lifetime, the higher their status becomes. As a result, their ability to connect with others' point-of-view disappears, including the low-income population they were once ties to.
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