BidenBucks Is Beeple Is Bitcoin

In a system rigged by the rich, outsiders have to make their own volatility.

Intelligencer’s Jebediah Reed spoke to Scott Galloway, a host of the New York and Vox Media podcasts Pivot and The Prof G Show, respectively, about the transformation of the economy.

One of the most valuable living artists is a guy who makes GIFs. A Reddit mob sent GameStop shares soaring. Meanwhile—in the midst of a once-in-a-century pandemic and an economic crisis—the stock market only goes up. Are these isolated things or part of something bigger?

I think it all comes back to one central theme: income inequality. Capitalism is sort of this gangster construct that leverages a species’ selfishness and creates all sorts of prosperity from that selfishness. But the key to successful capitalism has always been a middle class. At the turn of the millennium, America was the only superpower, and we had the most prosperous middle class in the world. In the past 20 years, the key feature of China’s rise into a superpower has been adding several hundred million people to its middle class. But for the past 50 years in America, we have decided to transfer wealth from the middle class to the shareholder class. The lower and middle classes haven’t done any worse, and they haven’t done any better but the share of income controlled by the top one percent has exploded. And I think that creates all sorts of externalities.

Externalities like GameStop.