On the narrow chance that she entered the top 0.001 percent, her income would be more than seven times higher than in 1980, with a cohort average of $122 million. If Cohen entered the top 1 percent of earners, her income would be more than triple what a 1 percenter earned in her parents’ day-an average of $1.3 million a year for that elite group versus $428,000 in 1980, adjusted for inflation.

The study showed that a college graduate like Cohen, on the safe assumption that she ended up in the top 10 percent of earners, would be making more than twice as much before taxes as a similarly situated person in 1980. “Piketty and some colleagues would later publish a paper containing a startling fact about 2014, the year of Cohen’s graduation and debut as a self-supporting earner. Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World The precariousness at the bottom, which had shown few signs of improving several years after the meltdown, had become the fodder for a bounty of services for the affluent-and, Scholz noted, for the “channeling of wealth in fewer and fewer hands.” Somehow, the technologies celebrated by the Valley as leveling playing fields and emancipating people had fostered a slick new digitally enabled upstairs-downstairs line in American social life.” And as the fallout from the crash spread, many of those cut loose had been drafted into joining a new American servant class. An epic meltdown of the world financial system had cost millions of people their homes, jobs, and health insurance. It was no accident, Scholz believed, that these services had taken off at the historical moment that they had. Here were a handful of companies thriving by serving as middlemen between people who wanted rides and people who offered them, people who wanted their Ikea furniture assembled and people who came over to install it, people who defrayed their costs by renting out a room and people who stayed there. “As he surveyed the world being remade by Silicon Valley, and especially what was once called the sharing economy, he began to see through the fantasy-speak.

Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas