But it seems like a conversation we ought to have, especially since the oligarchs are back in the news: On an almost daily basis Russian oligarchs are losing their super-yachts, while American billionaires are scooping up major social media networks.
But we don’t like to call them oligarchs do we?
So let’s try to define our terms here. A quick internet search turns up this definition of an oligarch as “a very rich business leader with a great deal of political influence.”
As David Leonhardt noted yesterday:
This wealth conveys vast power on a small group of people. They can attempt to shape politics, as the Koch family has done. They can create a global charity, as Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates have done. They can buy a national media organization, as Jeff Bezos has done.
This is part of a larger pattern. The top 1% of Americans now control about a third of the nation’s total wealth, and the hyper-rich (the top .01%) continue to increase their concentration of wealth. You don’t have to be Bernie Sanders to recognize that this has consequences. Again, via Leonhardt:
A small number of very wealthy people end up making decisions that affect millions of others. That has always been true, of course. But it is truer when inequality is so high. In the U.S. economy, wealth inequality has exceeded even the peaks of the 1920s: