Recent quotes:

The Mystery Behind Tom Wolfe’s ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ Protagonist - Bloomberg

Tom, being Tom, and so facing a thousand distractions, knew he needed the discipline of a deadline to write his first novel, and sold Rolling Stone on the idea of running it in the magazine as a serial, in the fashion of Charles Dickens. The plot is more or less the same as the published novel, with one key exception. In the Rolling Stone version, McCoy is a writer.

Car dealers and electric vehicles: At a blowout party for unsung GOP heavyweights, the men were drunk—and anxious.

Auto dealers are one of the five most common professions among the top 0.1 percent of American earners. Car dealers, gas station owners, and building contractors, it turns out, make up the majority of the country’s 140,000 Americans who earn more than $1.58 million per year.* Crunching numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau, data scientist and author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz found that over 20 percent of car dealerships in the U.S. have an owner banking more than $1.5 million per year.

If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance. | MIT Technology Review

The wealthiest individuals are typically not the most talented or anywhere near it. “The maximum success never coincides with the maximum talent, and vice-versa,” say the researchers. So if not talent, what other factor causes this skewed wealth distribution? “Our simulation clearly shows that such a factor is just pure luck,” say Pluchino and co. The team shows this by ranking individuals according to the number of lucky and unlucky events they experience throughout their 40-year careers. “It is evident that the most successful individuals are also the luckiest ones,” they say. “And the less successful individuals are also the unluckiest ones.”

Wealth gap compounds

One powerful factor seems to be that whites are five times as likely as blacks to receive substantial gifts and inheritances, and the sums they get tend to be much larger. The money “can be used to jump-start further wealth accumulation, for example, by enabling white families to buy homes and begin acquiring equity earlier in their lives,” the study says. The result is that whites’ wealth advantage—and blacks’ disadvantage—gets passed down from generation to generation. Which means that forms of racial discrimination “that happened in the past, like redlining, continue to show up in bank accounts today,” says Traub.

Why Black Americans Stay Poor - Bloomberg View

a study exploring the idea that racial wealth inequality stems from life choices and personal achievement -- that is, that blacks would be as rich as whites if only they got good educations, formed stronger families, worked hard and saved money. Using data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, the researchers found that, as of 2013, none of that seemed to matter: Whether they were college-educated, married with kids, employed full-time or prudent savers, black families’ net worth was invariably many times lower than that of white families with the same characteristics.

What Happens Next Will Amaze You

Here is Bill Maris, of Google Ventures. This year alone Bill gets to invest $425 million of Google's money, and his stated goal is to live forever. He's explained that the worst part of being a billionaire is going to the grave with everyone else. “I just hope to live long enough not to die.” I went to school with Bill. He's a nice guy. But making him immortal is not going to make life better for anyone in my city. It will just exacerbate the rent crisis. Here's Elon Musk. In a television interview this week, Musk said: "I'm trying to do useful things." Then he outlined his plan to detonate nuclear weapons on Mars. These people are the face of our industry. Peter Thiel has publicly complained that giving women the vote back in 1920 has made democratic capitalism impossible. He asserts that "the fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism." I'm so tired of this shit. Aren't you tired of this shit?

Meet the .001%, the UNHW

The explosion of wealth among ultra high net worth (UNHW) individuals around the world has made all of this possible. According to a new study from UBS and Wealth-X, there are 211,275 people in the world who could be considered ultra high net worth, with assets totaling north of $30 million. The approximate amount of wealth controlled by this group is estimated at just under $30 trillion. And while the number of UHNW people grew by 6% since 2013, their assets grew by 7%.
En 2013, 20% des Diane et des Adèle ont obtenu une mention “TB”. Ce n’est le cas que de 4% des Enzo et des Anissa. 16% des Clara, 4,5% des Jeremy. Ces différences entre prénoms ne sont pas dues aux prénoms : les copies sont corrigées anonymement, et le prénom n’a rien de magique. Le prénom indique — de manière imparfaite et floue — l’origine sociale de celles et ceux qui le portent, et la réussite scolaire est, en partie, liée à cette origine sociale : “Parmi les élèves entrés en sixième en 1995, 71,7% des enfants d’enseignants ont finalement décroché en 2010 un bac général, 68,2% des enfants de cadres supérieurs, 20,1% des enfants d’ouvriers qualifiés, 13% des enfants d’ouvriers non qualifiés, et 9,2% des enfants d’inactifs”.