Stephan: In the United States, there are 21,951,000 millionaires and 735 billionaires. This in a country where the median American income in 2022 was $54,132. We have the worst wealth inequality in the developed world and it has distorted every aspect of American society because the United States is a culture that only has one social priority: greed and the profit it produces for individuals and whose tax structure is so biased for the rich, that millionaires and billionaires often pay less taxes than waitresses. As Elon Musk has so blatantly made clear this past year, the uber-rich are not necessarily any smarter than say an average college professor, and with a few notable exceptions they certainly aren't any nicer than say a factory worker. But they do live in a world the average American cannot even comprehend. It's not about expensive cars, or having a big house. That's the upper middle class. And nothing makes the wealth inequality difference clearer than what the uber-rich are doing to prepare for climate change.
A billionaire’s underground hideaway refuge for the coming climate change.
I got invited to a super-deluxe resort to deliver a speech to what I assumed would be 100 or so investment bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk – about a third of my annual salary as a professor at a public college – all to deliver some insight on “the future of technology.”
As a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives, I am often mistaken for a futurist. And I’ve never really liked talking about the future, especially for wealthy people. The Q&A sessions always end up more like parlor games, where I’m asked to opine on the latest technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols on a stock exchange: AI [artificial intelligence], VR [virtual reality], CRISPR. The audiences are rarely interested in learning about how these technologies work or their impact on society beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them. But […]
