Mastering the Universe: The Obscene Wealth of the Ruling Class, What They Do with Their Money, and Why...

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Rob Larson

Mastering the Universe

The Obscene Wealth of the Ruling Class, What They Do with Their Money, and Why You Should Hate...

Rob Larson

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English

Haymarket Books
01 January 2025

Social classes; Central government policies; Political economy

Economist Rob Larson combines wit, righteous anger, and clear-eyed analysis as he dissects the lifestyle, moral bankruptcy, and stupidly large sums of money hoarded by the disgustingly wealthy.

The fact that we live in one of the most unequal societies in the history of the world is becoming common knowledge. And while lists of 'richest people in x country' may be easy to come by, how much do we really know about the billionaires who sit atop our global economic system? Who are they, really? How did they accumulate their ill-gotten gains? And what kind of depravities do they use to maintain their positions?

Turning their own weapons of class-war against them

from the fawning profiles found in the Mansion section of the Wall Street Journal to the national income data buried in white papers meant solely for investors and technocrats

Larson crunches the numbers so you don't have to.

But he doesn't stop there, because appreciating the sheer scale of the global wealth gap doesn't even touch on all the ways the ruling class are making us miserable, breaking our society to pieces, and destroying the planet in their pursuit of

ever-increasing power and profit. As we behold whole continents on fire, pandemics thrashing public health systems to smithereens, and declining lifespans for the vast majority, Larson argues that the only way forward is to yank on the emergency break and give capitalism the boot.

By: Rob Larson
Imprint: Haymarket Books
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm,
ISBN: 9798888900857
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 01 January 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Prologue—The Fun Percent Introduction—Atlas Ran (Who’s in charge here?) Chapter 1—The Numbers (Just how rich are we talking about?) Chapter 2—The Lifestyle (It’s worse than you think) Chapter 3—The Classes (What about the rest of us?) Chapter 4—The Clans (Ruling class subspecies) Chapter 5—The Burden (The jet set’s debt to climate) Chapter 6—The Lies (The Right’s feverish “liberal elites”) Chapter 7—The Plan (The socialist movement to stick it to the Man)

Rob Larson is a professor of economics at Tacoma Community College and author of Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley, and Capitalism vs. Freedom. He writes for Jacobin, In These Times, and Dollars & Sense. He is the House Economist at Current Affairs. Larson lives in Tacoma, Washington (because Jeff Bezos has made Seattle unliveably expensive).

Reviews for Mastering the Universe: The Obscene Wealth of the Ruling Class, What They Do with Their Money, and Why You Should Hate Them Even More

Praise for Bit Tyrants: ""Highly informed, lively and readable, this is a badly needed study of the giant high tech corporations that increasingly dominate the means of work and social interaction, amass and scrutinize the details of our lives, seek to shape attitudes and behavior, and like the great virtual monopolies of the past both rely on state power and heavily influence it. Beyond exposing the nature of this awesome and threatening system.” —Noam Chomsky ""Today's tech giants control technologies that have suffused our lives, and they have generated a self-glorifying mythology and hype to match. Rob Larson's Bit Tyrants helps puncture this ideological reality-distortion field, providing a guide to monopolistic giants like Amazon and Google, as they transform labor, politics, war and more. He does all this with a sarcastic wit that will bring a smile to anyone who has cursed the malign influence of these companies and their plutocratic rulers on 21st Century life."" —Peter Frase, author of Four Futures ""Larson’s book makes an effective case that economic exploitation under capitalism has derailed the achievement of full human freedom for far too long."" —Z Network