For this reason, measures of wealth or earning capacity can easily mislead, especially given the number of financial obligations members of this group take on as they attempt to overcome the past in their wider families.
Whatever its cause, suspicion of wealth is one reason that Mr Sarkozy is in trouble over his party's links to France's richest woman, Liliane Bettencourt, the L'Oréal heiress.
"The reason: improving distribution of wealth".
Social media, blogs and digital journalism are leveling the playing field and serving as the foundation for broader participation in democracy, and the elevation of reason over wealth and power.
"It is about whether or not we are still capable — given the ill health of our democracy and the current dominance of wealth over reason — of perceiving important and complex realities clearly enough to promote and protect the sustainable well-being of the many.
The main reason for the radical accumulation of wealth in the hands of the 1 percent is federal policy: changes to the tax structure that allow the wealthiest Americans to retain even more of their income and capital gains, and corporate welfare policies that effectively transfer money from the 99 percent to corporations.
The tax-for-pre-K proposal persuasively made a case that funding the educations of the youngest New Yorkers was the right thing to do, whether for moral or for pragmatic reasons, and that the redistribution of wealth — that scariest of socialist slogans — might equally amount to the redistribution of opportunity, which is among the most dearly held of American values.
An important part of Piketty's book is the discussion on the reasons for the accelerating accumulation of wealth by the "rentiers" class.
As long as corporate interests remain politically ascendant, there is every reason to believe that this process of wealth extraction from the middle class — and, indeed, from the nation itself, as falling tax revenue saps its infrastructure — will only accelerate.
Nor are banks keen on forgiving debts, for the obvious reason that this means a transfer of wealth from them to their borrowers in the construction and property industries.One way or another, the government will probably have to force the banks to act.
