Paul Krugman Notices He's In The One Percent
01/20/2014
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Paul Krugman writes in "The Undeserving Rich:"

The Occupy movement popularized the concept of the “1 percent,” which is a good shorthand for the rising elite, but if anything includes too many people: most of the gains of the top 1 percent have in fact gone to an even tinier elite, the top 0.1 percent.

I've never quite understood the political appeal of defining the Class Enemy so broadly as to include over 3 million people. I would think that you'd want to define it much more narrowly: The 400, say, the number who could fit into Mrs. Astor's ballroom, which Forbes appropriated a third of a century ago.

Perhaps one problem is that if you start narrowing the number of Class Enemies down to the point where it gets personalized, then you run into the problem that lots of people like famous rich individuals. Billionaires can afford appealing public relations strategies.

But I'm probably overthinking this. I doubt if all that many people denouncing the One Percent have ever even calculated what is one percent of the the population of the country (what's that?). One Percent is just a numeric-looking shorthand for a Really Small Number.

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