Plutocrats The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

A Financial Times Best Book of the Year
Shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize

There has always been some gap between rich and poor in this country, but recently what it means to be rich has changed dramatically. Forget the 1 percent—Plutocrats proves that it is the wealthiest 0.1 percent who are outpacing the rest of us at breakneck speed. Most of these new fortunes are not inherited, amassed instead by perceptive businesspeople who see themselves as deserving victors in a cutthroat international competition. With empathy and intelligence, Plutocrats reveals the consequences of concentrating the world’s wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Propelled by fascinating original interviews with the plutocrats themselves, Plutocrats is a tour de force of social and economic history, the definitive examination of inequality in our time.

Chrystia Freeland is the managing editor and director of consumer news at Thomson Reuters and the author of Sale of the Century: The Inside Story of the Second Russian Revolution. She lives in New York City.