The Billionaire Surge and the Starving Queue: How the World Rewrote Morality in Dollars
There are two images that will not leave me. The first is quiet, almost invisible: a stretch of people standing in the cold outside a community center in a European city . They are not refugees or migrants in transit; they are ordinary citizens retired factory workers, young parents with worn coats, immigrants who have paid taxes for years. They arrive before dawn and wait in a line that seems to have no end, clutching plastic bags, tattered receipts, an old grocery list. When the doors open, volunteers distribute bread, tins, and a handful of essentials. The relief is immediate; the gratitude is deep, the shame almost palpable. The second image could not be farther in tone or scale: a celebration on a luxury yacht, a ribbon-cutting in front of a private jet, an auction room bidding to trillion-dollar valuations. It is the world of extreme wealth - those private planes and art pieces that the press calls “good problems,” and of portfolios whose daily gains would feed thousands. In that...