Adam Tooze
Oligarchs, wealthy and influential capitalists – what you might call “personal capital” as opposed to “institutional” or “societal” or “class” capital – are an increasingly important feature of contemporary political economy.
The profile of this top wealth is worth understanding.
There are about 3500 people worldwide worth more than $1 billion. Their share of global wealth is “only” roughly 3-3.5 %. Nevertheless, their huge wealth, the business and technological wagers they engage in, their political, societal and cultural alignments exert an outsized influence on contemporary reality.
I’m not at all convinced by talk of a neo-feudal mode of production. But we clearly do live in a world in which this kind of oligarchic, capitalist “aristocracy” matters more than it did in the age of corporate capitalism or even first stage financialization where the talk was of “shareholder value”.