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

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Description

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.

How did they accumulate their ill-gotten gains And what kind of depravities do they use to maintain their positions

to the national income data buried in white papers meant solely for investors and technocratsLarson crunches the numbers so you dont have to.

But he doesnt stop there, because appreciating the sheer scale of the global wealth gap doesnt 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.

Reviews

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

Author Bio

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).