The Poor and the Plutocrats is an examination of financial inequality. From Apple, the first trillion-dollar company, at one end of the spectrum to those living in dire poverty on the other, Francis Teal explains how a world has emerged where both of these extremes co-exist.

A Financial Times Best Book of the Year Shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize There has always been some gap between rich and poor in this country, but recently what it means to be rich has changed dramatically. Forget the 1 percent—Plutocrats proves that it is the wealthiest 0.1 percent who are outpacing the rest of us at breakneck speed. Most of these new fortunes are not inherited, amassed instead by perceptive businesspeople who see themselves as deserving victors in a cutthroat international competition. With empathy and intelligence, Plutocrats reveals the consequences of concentrating the world’s wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Propelled by fascinating original interviews with the plutocrats themselves, Plutocrats is a tour de force of social and economic history, the definitive examination of inequality in our time.

This data-driven book offers insight into the fallacy of widespread opportunity, the fate of the middle class, and the mechanisms that perpetuate income disparity.

Like the robber barons of the 19th century Gilded Age, a new and proliferating crop of billionaires is driving rapid development and industrialization in poor countries. The accelerated industrial growth spurs economic prosperity for some, but it also widens the gap between the super rich and the rest of the population, especially the very poor. In Rich People Poor Countries, Caroline Freund identifies and analyzes nearly 700 emerging-market billionaires whose net worth adds up to more than $2 trillion. Freund finds that these titans of industry are propelling poor countries out of their small-scale production and agricultural past and into a future of multinational industry and service-based mega firms. And more often than not, the new billionaires are using their newfound acumen to navigate the globalized economy, without necessarily relying on political connections, inheritance, or privileged access to resources. This story of emerging-market billionaires and the global businesses they create dramatically illuminates the process of industrialization in the modern world economy.

Campaign financing is one of today’s most divisive political issues. The left asserts that the electoral process is rife with corruption. The right protests that the real aim of campaign limits is to suppress political activity and protect incumbents. Meanwhile, money flows freely on both sides. In Plutocrats United, Richard Hasen argues that both left and right avoid the key issue of the new Citizens United era: balancing political inequality with free speech. The Supreme Court has long held that corruption and its appearance are the only reasons to constitutionally restrict campaign funds. Progressives often agree but have a much broader view of corruption. Hasen argues for a new focus and way forward: if the government is to ensure robust political debate, the Supreme Court should allow limits on money in politics to prevent those with great economic power from distorting the political process.

"Was it you who yawned so, Clementina?" Nobody answered. The questioner was an old gentleman in his eightieth year or so, dressed in a splendid flowered silk Kaftan, with a woollen night-cap on his head, warm cotton stockings on his feet, and diamond, turquoise, and ruby rings on his fingers. He was reclining on an atlas ottoman, his face was as wooden as a mummy's, a mere patch-work of wrinkles, he had a dry, thin, pointed nose, shaggy, autumnal-yellow eyebrows, and his large prominent black eyes protected by irritably sensitive eyelids, lent little charm to his peculiar cast of countenance. "Well! Will nobody answer? Who yawned so loudly behind my back just now?" he asked again, with an angry snort. "Will nobody answer?" Nobody answered, and yet there was a sufficient number of people in the room to have found an answer between them. In front of the hearth was sitting a young woman about thirty or thirty-five, with just such a strongly-pronounced pointed nose, with just such high raised eyebrows as the old gentleman's, only her face was still red (though the favour of Nature had not much to do with that perhaps) and her eyebrows were still black; but her thin lips were just as hermetically sealed as the old man's, when she was not speaking. This young woman was playing at Patience.

In the last few decades what it means to be rich has changed dramatically. Forget the 1%; it's the wealthiest .01% who are fast outpacing the rest of us. Today's colossal fortunes are amassed by the diligent toiling of smart, perceptive businessmen who see themselves as deserving victors in a cutthroat international competition. Cracking open this tight-knit world is Chrystia Freeland, an acclaimed business journalist. At ease in Davos or Dubai, Freeland has reported on the lives and minds of these new super-elites for nearly a decade. Grounding her interviews in the economics and history of modern capitalism, she provides examples of the new wealth and its consequences. She showcases the $3 million birthday party of a New York financier months before the financial meltdown; details the closed-door 2005 SEC meeting where the US government allowed investment banks to write their own regulatory laws; and tells how the Bank of Canada's Mark Carney became a key figure in the central battle between the plutocracy and the rest of us. Brightly written and powerfully researched, Freeland's Plutocrats will be a lightning rod event in the midst of the US election season.

In 1956, a U.S. lawyer-economist, Louis O. Kelso, created the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) to enable the employees of a closely held newspaper chain to buy out its retiring owners. Two years later, Kelso and his co-author, the philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, explained the macro-economic theory on which the ESOP is based in this best-selling book, The Capitalist Manifesto. “When you read this book, you must be prepared for a shock—particularly if you are among the millions of Americans who feel complacent about the material well-being that now prevails in this country. THE CAPITALIST MANIFESTO will compel you to examine, reconsider and question many dangerous economic factors and political tendencies you have accepted as inevitable—and will show you how you can do something about them. “THE CAPITALIST MANIFESTO sets the alarm for all American citizens—not simply one group or class. It is for stockholders, workers, labor leaders, corporation executives, investment bankers, taxpayers, small businessmen and industrialists, statesmen, legislators, judges and educators. Its purpose is to arouse us to the real and present dangers we now face, from inflation and from the progressive socialization of our economy. What is the difference between a well-heeled existence in a welfare state and the good life in a free society? THE CAPITALIST MANIFESTO will tell you what that difference is, and why you must be a man of property in order to be a free man. It will explain the meaning of your ever-expanding opportunities for leisure. It will tell you that the goal of an industrial society should not be full employment in the production of wealth, but full enjoyment of the wealth produced. It will tell you how you, as an individual, can best use wealth to further the happiness and well-being of yourself and your fellow men.” “A revolutionary force in human affairs offering still unplumbed promise for the future....”—Time Magazine