Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (49 page)

women outnumbered men
Catherine Rampell, “Women Now a Majority in American Workplaces,”
New York Times
, February 6, 2010.

In 2010, about four in ten
Sarah Jane Glynn, “The New Breadwinners: 2010 Update,” Center for American Progress, April 2012. http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2012/04/pdf/breadwinners.pdf.

In 1979, nearly 8 percent
“Jobs and Income Growth of the Top Earners and the Causes of Changing Income Inequality: Evidence from U.S. Tax Return Data,” working paper, April 2012, p. 19. http://web.williams.edu/Economics/wp/BakijaColeHeimJobsIncomeGrowthTopEarners.pdf.

CHAPTER 3: SUPERSTARS

“A society in which knowledge workers dominate”
Peter Drucker, “The Age of Social Transformation,”
The Atlantic
, November 1994, p. 67.

“It is probably a misfortune that”
Friedrich A. Hayek,
Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Volume 2: The Mirage of Social Justice
(The University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 74.

“It is possible that intelligent tadpoles”
R. H. Tawney,
Equality
(Capricorn Books, 1961), p. 108.

samizdat manuscript
György Konrád and Iván Szelényi,
The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power
(Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979).

The consensus, advanced most powerfully
David Autor, “The Polarization of Job Opportunities in the U.S. Labor Market,” Center for American Progress and The Hamilton Project, April 2010.

In a January 2012 speech about income inequality
Alan B. Krueger, “The Rise and Consequences of Inequality in the United States,” remarks prepared for an event at the Center for American Progress, January 12, 2012.

But the best explanation
See Noam Scheiber, “The Audacity of Data: Barack Obama’s Surprisingly Non-Ideological Policy Shop,”
The New Republic
, March 12, 2008.

“Above all, Obama’s form of pragmatism”
Cass Sunstein, “The Empiricist Strikes Back: Obama’s Pragmatism Explained,”
The New Republic
, September 10, 2008.

Word crunchers found that the president’s 2009 inaugural address
Justin Wolfers, “The Empiricist-in-Chief,”
Freakonomics
blog, February 26, 2009.

Elizabeth Billington was a diva
See Elizabeth Billington’s entry in Philip H. Highfill, Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans,
A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800
(SIU Press, 1993), pp. 122–29.

“The relative fall in the incomes to be earned”
Marshall,
Principles of Economics
, Book VI, Chapter XII, Section 11.

China’s Ming Dynasty, which ruled the Middle Kingdom
Patricia Buckley Ebrey,
The Cambridge Illustrated History of China
(Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 201.

“A striking instance is that of writing”
Marshall,
Principles of Economics
, Book VI, Chapter XII, Section 9.

“The number of persons who can be reached”
Ibid., Section 11.

“Even adjusted for 1981 prices”
Sherwin Rosen, “The Economics of Superstars,”
American Economic Review
71:5 (December 1981), p. 857.

In 1900, nearly all spectator entertainment
Gerben Bakker, “Time and Productivity Growth in Services: How Motion Pictures Industrialized Entertainment,” LSE working paper 119/09, March 2009, p. 7 and table B1. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/27866/1/WP119.pdf.

$670,000 to produce
Ted Okuda and David Maska,
Charlie Chaplin at Keystone and Essanay: Dawn of the Tramp
(iUniverse, 2005).

In 1859, Anthony Trollope
Francis Evans Baily,
Six Great Victorian Novelists
(Kennikat Press, 1969).

“an entirely new economic model”
Chris Anderson, “The Long Tail,”
Wired
, October 2004.

“I’m a pilot, so I understand airplane economics”
CF interview with Eric Schmidt, February 23, 2011.

median salary for American lawyers
William D. Henderson, “Three Generations of U.S. Lawyers: Generalists, Specialists, Project Managers,”
Maryland Law Review
, vol. 70, no. 1, 2011.

In 2011, a year when top partner paydays
See Nathan Koppel and Vanessa O’Connell, “Pay Gap Widens at Big Law Firms as Partners Chase Star Attorneys,”
Wall Street Journal
, February 8, 2011; and Vanessa O’Connell, “Big Law’s $1,000-Plus an Hour Club,”
Wall Street Journal
, February 23, 2011.

David Boies’s hourly rate
Vanessa O’Connell, “With Oracle and Dodgers Waiting, Boies Not Ready to Retire,”
Wall Street Journal
, August 1, 2011.

average starting salary for a law school graduate
See the National Association of Law Placement’s Employment Report and Salary Survey for the Class of 2010. http://www.nalp.org/uploads/Classof2010SelectedFindings.pdf.

average lawyer earned
May 2011 National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates, Bureau of Labor Statistics. http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes231011.htm.

The most advanced example of this trend is e-discovery
See John Markoff, “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software,”
New York Times
, March 4, 2011.

(Meanwhile, DLA Piper, one of the law firms)
See Nathan Koppel and Vanessa O’Connell. “Pay Gap Widens at Big Law Firms as Partners Chase Star Attorneys,”
Wall Street Journal
, February 8, 2011.

In the age of the global super-elite, even dentists
Joan Juliet Buck, “Drill, Bébé, Drill,”
New York Times T Magazine
, August 10, 2011.

Her 2011 single “Born This Way”
Dorothy Pomerantz, “Lady Gaga Tops Celebrity 100 List,”
Forbes
, May 18, 2011; “The Celebrity 100,”
Forbes
, June 6, 2011.

Between May 2010 and May 2011
According to the Census Bureau, real median household income was $49,445 in 2010.

Mrs. Billington’s fabulous £10,000 income
CF e-mail correspondence with Peter Lindert, June 25, 2012.

Mickey Mantle, the New York Yankees star hitter
Baseball Almanac
, www.baseball-almanac.com/players/player.php?p=mantlmi01.

Compare that with Alex Rodriguez
USA Today
Salaries database, http://content.usatoday.com/sportsdata/baseball/mlb/salaries/player/alex-rodriguez.

Adjusted for inflation, Rodriguez’s earnings
According to the Major League Baseball Players Association, the average salary for a Major Leaguer was $3,095,183 in 2011.

In a study of concert ticket prices
Alan B. Krueger, “The Economics of Real Superstars: The Market for Rock Concerts in the Material World,”
Journal of Labor Economics
23:1 (2005).

“very, very lucrative”
Chrystia Freeland, “The Rise of Private News,”
Columbia Journalism Review
, July/August 2010.

As late as 1920
Mary Schenck Woolman,
Clothing—Choice, Care, Cost
(Lippincott, 1922).

“For much of the twentieth century, labor and capital”
Roger L. Martin and Mihnea C. Moldoveanu, “Capital Versus Talent: The Battle That’s Reshaping Business,”
Harvard Business Review
, July 2003.

“In the knowledge society the employees”
Drucker, “The Age of Social Transformation.”

Wall Street investors, such as hedge fund managers
Steven N. Kaplan and Joshua Rauh, “Wall Street and Main Street: What Contributes to the Rise in the Highest Incomes?,”
Review of Financial Studies
23:3 (March 2010). pp. 1004–50.

“When I graduated from college”
CF interview with David Rubenstein, April 27, 2011.

But the real mass revolution sparked by the rise of entrepreneurial finance
Christine Harper, “Goldman CEO Blankfein Gets $67.9 Million Bonus, New Pay Record,” Bloomberg News, December 24, 2007; David Segal, “$100 Million Payday Poses Problem for Pay Czar,”
New York Times
, August 1, 2009.

We got a glimpse of that way of thinking when federal agents
Suzanna Andrews, “How Rajat Gupta Came Undone,”
Bloomberg Businessweek
, May 23, 2011.

twenty thousand people competed
Michael Klein and Michael D. Schaffer, “City Slivers Seen on Philly ‘Idol,’”
Philadelphia Inquirer
, January 17, 2008. Just 0.1% of Philadelphia contestants made it to the next round of
American Idol
auditions; in contrast, 7.1% of applicants to Harvard were admitted that year.

Merton found that scientists who published frequently
Merton, “The Matthew Effect,” pp. 56–63.

You can see the same power of accidental celebrity at work
Alan T. Sorensen, “Bestseller Lists and Product Variety,”
The Journal of Industrial Economics
55:4 (December 2007), pp. 715–38.

Matthew Salganik and Duncan Watts tested
Matthew Salganik and Duncan Watts, “Leading the Heard Astray: An Experimental Study of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies in an Artificial Cultural Market,”
Social Psychology Quarterly,
vol. 71, no. 4, 2008, pp. 338–355.