hat that's going to mean is that a lot of the things um that again that this wealthy say onethird of our society has normalized will have to change the size of our houses 00:12:01 we shouldn't be building really huge houses anymore I would also go further and say if we are really serious about climate change we need to think about the very large properties that we have which there are many of in our society 00:12:12 that need to be divided to make good quality and reasonable sized houses for say three or four families rather than just one family no more second homes and where second homes are in areas where other 00:12:25 people need to live they are no longer allowed to exist so no more second homes

if you look at somewhere like the UK 75% of all our flights are made by just 15% of the population and we know who that 15% are you know they're not the average person or the poor person so we're not talking about 00:12:49 someone who flies occasionally away on holiday we're talking about people who fly really regularly they have their second homes they have their big mansions they have their large cars and this particular group all of those 00:13:02 things will have to change

And where the artists take part in a fantasy of overconsumptionThe place where artists play a distinctive role, exactly like high-level sports athletes, is in the propagation of a certain fantasy.

One option is to cap the top 20% of energy users while allowing those people who use little energy and have poverty-level incomes to be able to increase their consumption levels and improve their quality of life.

Table 1. Interrelationship of wealth and emissions per capita.

i think climate change is going to put  a strong pressure in the sense that you know i   think when people see more and more catastrophic  climatic events you know i think attitudes toward   globalization and attitudes toward inequality in  general you know can change very quickly because   00:43:25 you know at some point i think people will  not find it funny at all to have all these   billionaires you know giving lessons using  their private jet doing your space tourism   et cetera you know at some point you know i think  nobody is going to find this funny at all and   there can be a very quick and and fast you know  complete change in attitude following this

i think the reason  your book was praised so much uh in the west is   you didn't come up with a threatening political  solution uh and uh when they said this was the   mark book is the marks for modern time that meant  don't read marx read this book and i suspect that   after you put all of this enormous good work  into the uh statistics that you did on wealth   00:15:30 and income i think the publisher probably said  well what are what are your solutions well you   just came up with uh the solution that you uh said  in the book and that's to tax income and wealth   uh this is not a threatening solution because  there's no way that you're going to tax wealth   as long as you have offshore banking centers to  conceal wealth as long as you have what the oil   00:15:54 industry put in place a hundred years ago the  flags of convenience pretending to make their   uh income abroad the fact is uh the one percent  don't really make much income they're ideal if   you're a billionaire you want to do what uh half  of american corporations do you don't make a penny   of taxable income uh that that's uh the whole  problem

Figure 6: Changing geographic source of emissions of world’s richest 1% 2015–2030

Exploring the consumption practices of the super-rich begins to highlight that they are best described as 'fast subjects' who dwell in what Castells (2000) terms the 'space of flows' rather than the 'space of places'.

there has been a spectacular rise in luxury consumption, with the consumption patterns of the global elite acting as a marker for those further down the income scale. Robert Frank (2000) describes the process as 'luxury fever', as consumption expectations are ratcheted up all the way down the income scale. The global elite are pushing up people's expectations and assumptions. In the US, for example, the average size of house has doubled, in square feet terms, in the past thirty years. In part it is a function of the positional nature of consumption. We consume in order to position ourselves relative to other people. Not only do the global elite raise the upper limit, everyone is thus forced to spend more just to keep up, but they also become the perceived benchmark, Juliet Schor's work, for example, shows that people are no longer keeping up with the people next door, but the people they see on television and magazines (Schor, 1998). In order to keep up with these raised consumption standards people are working harder and longer as well as taking out more debt. The increase in luxury consumption has raised consumption expectations further down the income scale, which in order to be funded has involved increased workloads and increased indebtedness. It is not so much keeping up with the Jones but 'keeping up with the Gates'.

Making money didn’t violate the spirit of equality, but an air of superior knowledge did, especially when it cloaked special privileges.

Meritocracy harms the elite as well. Life for the meritocratic elite is dominated by work. Substantial numbers of elites report that their work interferes with their health, prevents them from forming strong relationships with their children, gets in the way of good relationships with their spouses, and even makes it harder to have a satisfying sex life.

A Harvard Business Review survey found that 62 percent of high-earning individuals work over 50 hours a week, more than a third work over 60 hours a week, and one in 10 work over 80 hours a week. According to Markovits, elites today work an average of 12 more hours per week than middle-class workers (the equivalent of 1.5 additional workdays).

This is not the first time that the US “common man” has embraced populism. Who said the following? “What are the real issues that exist today in these United States? It is the trend of pseudointellectual government where a select elite group have written guidelines in bureaus and court decisions… looking down their noses at the average man on the street … the auto workers, … the little businessman…” (quoted in Cowie: http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1919&context=articles) This was George Wallace, in 1972, the year he scored a victory in the Democratic primary in Michigan, due primarily to “working-class” opposition to school busing on the heels of white flight to the suburbs. His “populist” message of “anti-elitism”, “anti-crime” and anti-busing wasn’t openly racist, but that was its content. Dewey Burton, the young male symbol of the 1970s (white) working class followed for years by the US media (as told by Cowie, above) was not a racist in his personal attitudes, but his alienation from ossified New Deal politics within a Fordist economic model that provided “only” high-wage job security (and for fewer and fewer people) manifested itself in a form that is fairly indistinguishable from the suddenly new “revolt” of the white working class in the rust belt in 2016 – and this well before Fordism entered into its terminal crisis later in the 70s.