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What Does The Rise Of Super-Fortunes Mean For The Rest Of Us?

Part 2 of the TED Radio Hour episode Haves And Have-Nots.

About Chrystia Freeland's TED Talk

Author and politician Chrystia Freeland says economic inequality is growing by leaps and bounds. She charts the rise of today's billionaire plutocrats and wonders what the concentration of wealth means for the rest of us.

About Chrystia Freeland

For the first time in history, if you are an energetic entrepreneur with a brilliant new idea or a fantastic new product ... you can get very, very rich, very, very quickly.

In her book, Plutocrats: The Rise Of The New Global Super-Rich And The Fall Of Everyone Else, Chrystia Freeland looks under the hood of global capitalism to explain the technological, economic and structural inequalities pushing society in unforeseen directions.

Along the way, she takes the temperature of a growing caste of super-rich billionaires and shows how the creation of vast fortunes at the top hollow out the middle class in Western industrialized countries.

Freeland began her career as an "accidental journalist" with front-line bulletins from the Ukraine in the heat of the Soviet collapse. She recently left her post as managing director and editor at Thomson Reuters. She's now running for office with the center-left Liberal Party of Canada.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

NPR/TED Staff