Top Highlights

• Every mention of it raises in fact the issue of the appropriateness or legitimacy of my income.”
• Savages are equal because they are equally weak and ignorant. Very civilized men can all become equal because they all have at their disposal similar means of attaining comfort and happiness. Between these two extremes is found inequality of condition, wealth, knowledge—the power of the few, the poverty, ignorance, and weakness of the rest.”
• “You had people in their thirties, through hedge funds and Goldman Sachs partner jobs, people who were making twenty, thirty, forty million a year. And there were a lot of them doing it. They started hanging out with each other. They became a pack. They started roaming the globe together as global high rollers and the differences between them and t...
• stratosphere.” In the 1970s, the top 1 percent of earners captured about 10 percent of the national income. Thirty-five years later, their share had risen to nearly a third of the national income, as high as it had been during the Gilded Age, the previous historical peak.
• “Yes, to cover the fringe benefits, the plane, the boat, it takes a billion,” Sawiris told me. “I mean, that’s my number for the minimum I want to go down—if I go down.”