{"id":22827,"date":"2017-02-18T20:01:18","date_gmt":"2017-02-19T01:01:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22827"},"modified":"2017-02-18T20:01:18","modified_gmt":"2017-02-19T01:01:18","slug":"johnson-elites-eying-the-exits-signals-americas-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22827","title":{"rendered":"Johnson: Elites Eying the Exits Signals America’s Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Johnson: Elites Eying the Exits Signals America’s Crisis<\/a><\/h3>\n

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Institute President\u00a0Rob Johnson interviewed by the\u00a0New Yorker on hedge-fund managers and the market for air strips in New Zealand<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Interviewed as part of an\u00a0extraordinary New Yorker investigation into growing anxiety among America\u2019s corporate elite<\/a>\u00a0over the potential for anarchic social collapse,\u00a0Institute President Robert Johnson<\/a>\u00a0saw his peers\u2019 talk of bolt-holes in New Zealand as reflecting a deeper crisis.<\/p>\n

Johnson told writer Evan Osnos of the mounting anxiety he had encountered among hedge-fund managers and other wealthy Americans he knew. \u201cMore and more were saying, \u2018You\u2019ve got to have a private plane,\u201d Johnson said. \u201cYou have to assure that the pilot\u2019s family will be taken care of, too. They have to be on the plane.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

Osnos writes: \u201cBy January, 2015, Johnson was sounding the alarm: the tensions produced by acute income inequality were becoming so pronounced that some of the world\u2019s wealthiest people were taking steps to protect themselves. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Johnson told the audience, \u2018I know hedge-fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

Johnson bemoaned the lack of a \u201cspirit of stewardship\u201d and openness to more aggressively redistributive tax policy among the wealthy.<\/p>\n

\u201cTwenty-five hedge-fund managers make more money than all of the kindergarten teachers in America combined,\u201d he told the New Yorker. \u201cBeing one of those twenty-five doesn\u2019t feel good. I think they\u2019ve developed a heightened sensitivity.\u201d<\/p>\n

If anything, Osnos wrote, inequality is widening, noting recent statistics from the National Bureau of Economic Research that showed that while incomes for the top 1 percent of Americans have nearly tripled, half of the population was earning at the same level they did in 1980, comparing America\u2019s wealth gap to that seen in the Democratic Republic of Congo.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

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Johnson: Elites Eying the Exits Signals America’s Crisis Institute President\u00a0Rob Johnson interviewed by the\u00a0New Yorker on hedge-fund managers and the market for air strips in New Zealand Interviewed as part of an\u00a0extraordinary New Yorker investigation into growing anxiety among America\u2019s corporate elite\u00a0over the potential for anarchic social collapse,\u00a0Institute President Robert Johnson\u00a0saw his peers\u2019 talk of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[2384,10573,14824,827],"class_list":["post-22827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-elite","tag-institute-for-new-economic-thinking","tag-rob-johnson","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22827"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22827\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22828,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22827\/revisions\/22828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}