#wealth inequality

#wealth inequality

The core of the argument is that agentic AI will replace human labor in most white-collar industries and will do so with dizzying speed. The consequent abrupt and massive job displacements will lead to crashes in property values and local tax bases, with devastating impacts on communities and much of the public sector.

Nearly half of the apartments in the seven tallest towers in the area sit empty. At night the picture is even starker, with dozens of darkened floors turning the glittering status symbol into a vertical 'ghost neighborhood' scraping the sky.

I would say, Rachel, that my takeaway from today is that the president or Trump 2.0 is definitely living in a gilded bubble. I would say, even if you compare it to his first term, the president is now surrounded by an administration that says yes, yes, please, thank you, and yes again. He truly is living like a king in this White House.

He says that for boomers, who lived through an economic boom, accumulating wealth was easy-or at least easier than it has ever been since. Baby boomers currently hold more than $85 trillion in assets, making them the richest generation by far. Therefore, they earn the title "all about the money." Millennials, meanwhile, were handed a map and told the exact steps to follow to find the financial success their parents enjoyed.

Trump ran on a promise to lower costs on day one, but a year into his presidency, the real beneficiaries are his billionaire donors. Instead of making life more affordable for everyday Americans, Trump has used the presidency to enrich himself and his billionaire allies, while making the largest cuts to Medicaid and food assistance in history and leaving working families behind.

Vibes-wise, the event was classic Trump 2.0-chic. Guests were handed monogrammed buckets of popcorn, framed screening tickets for their trophy shelves, and a limited-edition copy of Trump's 2024 book of the same title as her documentary, "Melania. " Prior to the screening, the black-tie guests were greeted by a taxpayer-funded military band that playing famous movie themes, as well as "Melania's Waltz," featured in the documentary and composed by Hollywood's Tony Neiman.

"At the end of the day, it's the investors and billionaires at Davos who have his attention, not the families struggling to afford their bills," said Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, a liberal think tank.

Since taking office, Trump has imposed a range of tariffs on countries, including key trading partners, leading to predictions of inflation skyrocketing, manufacturing screeching to a halt and unemployment soaring. None of those scenarios came true. Inflation, while above the Federal Reserve's target, was a modest 2.7 percent in December. The unemployment rate was relatively low, at 4.4 percent, last month.

Co-founder Arthur Clifton, a former leading figure in Just Stop Oil, explained the first strategy would involve a series of "take backs". Speaking to roughly 200 activists, he said: "We have seen that food is locked behind skyrocketing prices. Less and less people can afford less and less food. "So what we do is actually pretty obvious - we go in there, we take it out and we redistribute it to the local community. This is what we are going to be doing in March."

Credit scores are lower than they've ever been, particularly with Gen Z," Goodarzi told Editorial Director Andrew Nusca at Fortune Brainstorm AI last week. Credit balances across the board are also the highest they've been, Goodarzi added, but Gen Z are disproportionately hurting in this category, too. "[Gen Z] credit card balances are up 36-37%," Goodarzi added. But there's one silver lining: "They still have jobs," Goodarzi said. "And that's what's really keeping things together."

If Plato was the first Western political philosopher, Aristotle was the first political scientist in today's sense. Plato's Republic, for instance, envisages an unworldly political utopia. But in Politics, Aristotle investigates a comprehensive range of political forms and regimes, down to their unglamorous, operational details. To research the book, Aristotle sent pupils at the Lyceum, his school in Athens, to many Greek city-states to record their constitutions, forming a kind of empirical data set.

As a New York court weighed whether evidence was gathered illegally during Mangione's arrest on charges of fatally shooting a top healthcare executive on the streets of New York, America got a taste of the trial's potent mix of politics, social comment, conspiracy theory and Hollywood-style murder drama. Last week's lengthy proceedings yielded little new information in the way of rewriting Americans' collective understanding of Mangione's alleged role in killing United HealthCare executive Brian Thompson with a purported ghost gun.

In late October, Hurricane Melissa (that should have been called "Godzilla") battered western Jamaica with 185-mile-an-hour winds. It tossed the roofs of buildings about like splintering javelins, demolished municipal buildings and hospitals, snapped telephone poles like matchsticks, flattened crops, and dumped torrential floodwaters everywhere, leaving $8 billion in damage. That Category 5 storm's unprecedented ferocity was driven by an overheated Caribbean Sea, produced by 275 years of industrial civilization that has spewed obscene amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually.

"Why are we not giving incentives to companies to require them to give shares in their companies to all employees, at the same percentage of cash earnings as the CEO?" Cuban said. It is the right question to be asking. Because while the debate over wealth inequality continues, the solution has been hiding in plain sight for decades. The top 10% of U.S. households now control 67% of all wealth, while the bottom half holds just 2.5%.

Social class permeates all aspects of life, and love is no exception. In Spain, for instance, couples don't form randomly; rather, they're typically determined by socioeconomic factors. This means that people tend to partner with those most similar to themselves in terms of income and wealth. And, at the top of the social ladder, this tendency intensifies. Those who earn and have the most assets find each other with a frequency three times greater than would occur in a society where relationships were completely random.