Forbes Hates Thomas Piketty
  • Forbes hates that Thomas Piketty has ruined its popular billionaires party.

After Forbes listed the wealthiest 400 humans in the United States last week, it turned its guns on the French economist/pest Thomas Piketty, who in the book Capital in the 21st Century claims that advanced capitalist societies are returning to levels of inequality and social/economic conditions that prevailed in Europe and the United States before World War I. At that time, the top 10 percent of society commanded almost 50 percent of its income, and inheritance was the dominant/surest source of wealth. There is a lot of evidence for Piketty's theory, and in the face of this growing evidence and the success of his book, Forbes' celebration of the richest of the rich looked downright obscene and untimely. Indeed, in one year, the wealthiest Americans collectively increased their wealth by an ugly $270 billion.

How to justify this madness? Claim that most of the billionaires on the list are self-made and not born with a "silver spoon."

More than two-thirds of the listed billionaires, Forbes declared, made their money the hard and honest way. But how did it determine if a billionaire is self-made or not? Well, if you did not inherit a ridiculously big chunk of money, you qualified as self-made. This means, Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey are the same: self-made. Bill Gates came from a place that is just like rural Mississippi. He went to schools that are similar in every way to the ones Winfrey attended. No kidding, this is how Forbes makes its measurements. But in reality, Bill Gates began in the 10 percent, as did Rupert Murdoch (self-made), and Mark Zuckerberg (self-made). Forbes has no idea of the difference between being at the bottom of the 10 percent and being even at the top of the bottom 25 percent.