Attention Economy


Sunday, December 4, 2016

A Cabinet Fit for the New Gilded Age

Trump cabinet appointments highlights the power of Wall Street:
“Donald Trump’s administration will be the most affluent ever. Estimates are imprecise because we don’t even know the president-elect’s true net worth, but the wealth of his cabinet picks so far range from $12bn to $35bn. At the very least, this quadruples that of the Obama cabinet. But more than just representing his friends, loyalists and family, the natural alliances among these people, their hallowed predispositions, will impact the policies they form.
We know the dangers of this skewed power. Before F Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, he published The Rich Boy, a 1924 short story, in which the narrator says: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me ... They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.””

Related:
Paul Krugman on the betrayal of the working class
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/opinion/seduced-and-betrayed-by-donald-trump.html