Revolutions, like bankruptcies, come gradually, and then suddenly. Any student of history knows that’s not the way it happens. What everyone wants to believe is that when things reach a tipping point and go from being merely crappy for the masses to dangerous and socially destabilizing, that we’re somehow going to know about that shift ahead of time. Here’s what I say to you: You’re living in a dream world. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. Before the revolution.Īnd so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. Today the top 1 percent share about 20 percent the bottom 50 percent, just 12 percent.īut the problem isn’t that we have inequality. The bottom 50 percent shared about 18 percent. In 1980, the top 1 percent controlled about 8 percent of U.S. The divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really, really fast. And what do I see in our future now?Īt the same time that people like you and me are thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country-the 99.99 percent-is lagging far behind. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. I’m not technical at all-I can’t write a word of code. I’m not the smartest guy you’ve ever met, or the hardest-working. Now I own a very large yacht.īut let’s speak frankly to each other. Cybershop didn’t make it, just another dot-com bust. The other Jeff started a web department store called Cybershop, but at a time when trust in Internet sales was still low, it was too early for his high-end online idea people just weren’t yet ready to buy expensive goods without personally checking them out (unlike a basic commodity like books, which don’t vary in quality-Bezos’ great insight). So I helped underwrite his tiny start-up bookseller. It just happened that the second Jeff-Bezos-called me back first to take up my investment offer. I was so excited by the potential of the web that I told both Jeffs that I wanted to invest in whatever they launched, big time. One was a guy you’ve probably never heard of named Jeff Tauber, and the other was a fellow named Jeff Bezos. The lucky part was that I had two friends, both immensely talented, who also saw a lot of potential in the web. Realizing that, seeing over the horizon a little faster than the next guy, was the strategic part of my success. I knew that as soon as the Internet became fast and trustworthy enough-and that time wasn’t far off-people were going to shop online like crazy. But I saw pretty quickly, even back then, that many of my customers, the big department store chains, were already doomed. In 1992, I was selling pillows made by my family’s business, Pacific Coast Feather Co., to retail stores across the country, and the Internet was a clunky novelty to which one hooked up with a loud squawk at 300 baud. And also like you, I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that the other 99.99 percent of Americans can’t even imagine. Like you, I have a broad perspective on business and capitalism. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many ways I’m no different from you. Then I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. I have founded, co-founded and funded more than 30 companies across a range of industries-from itsy-bitsy ones like the night club I started in my 20s to giant ones like, for which I was the first nonfamily investor. 01%ers, a proud and unapologetic capitalist. You probably don’t know me, but like you I am one of those. Nick Hanauer is a Seattle-based entrepreneur.
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