Researchers Study Mysterious Rich People Who Run Everything

For too long, researchers have focused on the colorful antics and poverty of the poor. But now that a very tiny elite in America -- just 1% of the population -- owns nearly everything and controls basically every aspect of life for the rest of Americans, including government and law and medicine and whether you will have enough money to pay for housing and food and drugs/alcohol to numb the dreary pain of existence, academic experts say it might be time to examine the habits of the Elite ... before they kill us all.

The New York Timesreports:  

“When we study the poor, it’s relatively easy,” said Sudhir Venkatesh, a professor of sociology at Columbia and the author ofGang Leader For a Day. “The poor don’t have the power to say no. Elites don’t grant us interviews. They don’t let us hang out at their country clubs.”

But Dorian Warren, an assistant professor of political science at Columbia, said the increasing concentration of wealth, moving from the top 10 percent of Americans to the top 1 percent, has made this the right time to look more closely at the group. “We have to understand what’s going on at the top,” Mr. Warren said.

Haha, "Gang Leader For a Day." Good luck becoming "Goldman Sachs chairman of the day." (You will be shot seventy-two times by private security.) [ NYT ]