Showing results for "Elites" in Economic History

Elite networks are informal social networks between politicians in power and top executives of politically connected firms where personal ties and long-term interactions build trust and loyalty between involved actors. Both groups draw benefits from these interactions; politicians stay in power, and corporate executives extract rents for their firms. Firms reward connected executives with higher salaries thus widening the dispersion of earnings in society. In Elite Networks, Vuk Vukovic offers a different perspective on the long-run origins of inequality.

America's political and economic elite spent so long making such terrible decisions that they caused the collapse of 2008. So how can they continue down the same road? No one in charge wants to publicly acknowledge is that things are still pretty great for the people who run America. It was an accident of history, Jeff Faux explains, that after World War II the US could afford a prosperous middle class, a dominant military, and a booming economic elite at the same time. For the past three decades, all three have been competing, with the middle class always losing. Next the military.