Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (51 page)

“I felt, having been late”
John Seabrook, “Streaming Dreams,”
New Yorker
, January 16, 2012.

published a 143-page report
“Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity,” McKinsey Global Institute, May 2011. http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/mgi/research/technology_and_innovation/big_data_the_next_frontier_for_innovation.

“People have always asked me”
CF interview with Larry Fink, October 20, 2010.

“Firestone’s historical excellence”
Donald Sull, “The Dynamics of Standing Still: Firestone Tire & Rubber and the Radial Revolution,”
The Business History Review
, vol. 73, no. 3 (Autumn 1999), pp. 430–64.

“An ossified success formula”
Donald Sull, “Ingrained success breeds failure,”
Financial Times
, October 2, 2005.

“Basically, we are living in a world”
Stephen Jennings, “Opportunities of a Lifetime: Lessons for New Zealand from New, High-Growth Economics,” Sir Ronald Trotter Lecture, April 7, 2009.

“A disruptive event now needs”
Michiyo Nakamoto and David Wighton, “Citigroup chief stays bullish on buy-outs,”
Financial Times
, July 9, 2007.

“I’ve been through probably six crises”
CF interview with Peter Weinberg, June 25, 2009.

the ability to “pivot”
Caroline O’Connor and Perry Klebahn, “The Strategic Pivot: Rules for Entrepreneurs and Other Innovators,”
Harvard Business Review
blog network, February 28, 2011.

Flickr’s genesis was in 2002
See Jessica Livingston,
Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days
(Apress, 2007), pp. 257–264.

“One thing that I’ve both wrestled with”
Chrystia Freeland, “The Credit Crunch According to Soros,”
Financial Times
, January 30, 2009.

“My conceptual framework, which basically emphasizes”
CF interview with George Soros, December 16, 2008.

“It’s an almost aggressive pessimism about his own ideas”
CF interview with Jonathan Soros, July 14, 2009.

“The businesses and institutions underpinning”
Jennings, “Opportunities of a Lifetime.”

“The group of winners is churning at an increasing and rapid rate”
“Measuring the Forces of Long-Term Change: The 2009 shift index”, Deloitte Center for the Edge, December 2009, p. 115.

“There are a lot of young entrepreneurs”
Sam Grobart and Evelyn M. Rusli, “For Flip Video Camera, Four Years from Hot Start-Up to Obsolete,”
New York Times
, April 12, 2011.

“If you want to get a reputation”
Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway Inc. 2006 Annual Report, February 28, 2007.

“Almost to a man, they lay great emphasis”
Merton, “The Matthew Effect,” pp. 56–63.

The power of choosing the right work is equally pronounced
Graeme Wood, “Secret Fears of the Super-Rich,”
The Atlantic
, April 2011.

“sudden wealth syndrome”
“Rich Man’s Burden,”
The Economist
, June 14, 2001.

“I had one friend”
CF interview with Viktor Vekselberg, September 7, 2010.

U.S. political scientists in 1999
Stephen E. Lucas and Martin J. Medhurst, “American Public Address: The Top 100 Speeches of the Twentieth Century,” National Communication Association, Seattle, Washington, November 8–12, 2000.

“It was the middle”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt campaign address on progressive government at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, California, September 23, 1932.

“In Russia, all the property”
Chrystia Freeland, “The Next Russian Revolution,”
The Atlantic
, October 2011.

“to buy an apartment”
Ibid.

“When I graduated”
Richard Cree, “Profile: Reid Hoffman,”
Director
, July/August 2009.

“I was focused on my CV”
CF interview with Reid Hoffman, February 17, 2012.

“After the eBay/PayPal deal”
Hoffman and Casnocha,
The Start-Up of You
, p. 169.

“Once-great companies”
Ibid., p. 18.

“You were born an entrepreneur”
Ibid., p.
3.

“the mind-sets and skill sets”
Ibid., p.
4.

“Over the last ten years”
“The Mobile Revolution: Driving the Next Wave of Productivity and Growth,” Council on Foreign Relations meeting, March 30, 2011. http://www.cfr.org/information-and-communication/mobile-revolution-driving-next-wave-productivity-growth/p24545.

U.S. workers take an average 30 percent pay cut
Till von Wachter, Jae Song, and Joyce Manchester, “Long-Term Earnings Losses due to Mass Layoffs During the 1982 Recession: An Analysis Using U.S. Administrative Data from 1974 to 2004,” Columbia University Economics Department Discussion Paper Series DP0910-07, April 2009.

“Your education isn’t fungible”
CF interview with Michael Spence, April 15, 2011.

“For the last sixty or so years”
Hoffman and Casnocha,
The Start-Up of You
, p. 5.

“Remember: If you don’t find risk, risk will find you”
Hoffman,
The Start-Up of You
, p. 188.

“In the past, when you thought”
Ibid., p.
187.

CHAPTER 5: RENT-SEEKING

“They steal and steal and steal”
From Chrystia Freeland,
Sale of the Century: Russia’s Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism
(Crown Business, 2000), pp. 67–68.

“Eating increases the appetite”
Ibid., p. 233.

risked becoming “an unequal oligarchy, or worse”
Raghuram Rajan, “Is There a Threat of Oligarchy in India?” Speech to the Bombay Chamber of Commerce on its Founders Day Celebration, September 10, 2008.

“quite coup”
Simon Johnson, “The Quiet Coup,”
The Atlantic
, May 2009.

“lower the amount of government spending”
Paul Ryan, “Saving the American Idea,” Remarks to the Heritage Foundation, October 26, 2011. http://blog.heritage.org/2011/10/26/video-rep-paul-ryan-on-saving-the-american-idea/.

“Once more, I am reminding you”
“Ukraine: Country’s Largest Steel Mill Sold at Auction,”
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
, October 24, 2005.

“It was like a football game!”
The Economist
, October 27, 2005.

“hate me—they don’t understand”
See Chrystia Freeland, “Tea with the FT: Yulia Tymoshenko,”
Financial Times
, August 16, 2008.

number of billionaires relative to the size
Ruchir Sharma.,“The billionaires list,”
Washington Post
’s
Wonkblog,
June 24, 2012.

economic historians have found that Russia’s oligarchs
Steven Nafziger and Peter Lindert, “Russian Inequality on the Eve of the Revolution” (working paper, March 13, 2011).

according to calculations by Branko Milanovic
Branko Milanovic,
The Haves and the Have Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality
(Basic Books, 2011), pp. 41–45.

“A person must be rich or poor”
Smith,
Wealth of Nations
, Book I, Chapter V, Section 1.

the only place in Mexico
Luhnow, “The Secrets of the World’s Richest Man.”

Slim was a vocal supporter of his friend’s reform effort
Slim continued to advocate privatization in subsequent decades. He was the cover boy of the 2012
Forbes
billionaire issue, which named him the richest man on the planet. In the accompanying story,
Forbes
asked Slim for his “plan to reboot the economy” of the world. Among Slim’s recommendations: “Let’s talk about Spain. It has a lot of highways and they are all free. They should charge users and sell [the highways] to the private sector.”

a study by Mexican and American political scientists
Isabel Guerrero, Luis-Felipe López-Calva, and Michael Walton, “The Inequality Trap and Its Links to Low Growth in Mexico,” in
No Growth Without Equity: Inequality, Interests, and Competition in Mexico
, ed. Santiago Levy and Michael Walton (World Bank, 2009).

“When it came to spectrum”
“All Lines Are Busy,”
Outlook
, November 29, 2010.

“India has been overwhelmed”
CF interview with Kiran Bedi, November 11, 2011.

“Corruption is endemic”
CF interview with Rajiv Lall, November 13, 2011.

“The Gini coefficient”
CF interview with Arun Maira, November 13, 2011.

“The tendency is that people”
CF interview with Kris Gopalakrishnan, November 12, 2011.

According to Hurun, the seventy richest members of the NPC
“China’s Billionaire People’s Congress Makes U.S. Peers Look Like Paupers,” Bloomberg News, February 27, 2012.