“Wealth and Poverty” Class 2: The investor’s view

Friends,

Thank you for joining me for Week 2 of my “Wealth and Poverty” class. (If you’re looking for the first session of the course, just click this link: Class 1.)

In today’s class, we begin to explore why inequalities of income and wealth have soared since the late 1970s.

Click below to jump right in:

The questions we’ll focus on today are:

— How did the market for financial capital contribute to inequalities of income and wealth?

— Did the accepted purpose of the American corporation change over the last 50 years, and, if so, when and how? 

— More generally, for whom should the corporation exist? Is there such a thing as “corporate social responsibility?”

You’ll find recommended readings linked below.

Thanks again for joining me! (And as always, let me know what you think in the comments below.)

P.S. If you’re enjoying this course and think your friends, family, colleagues, or social media networks would find it interesting and helpful as well, please share!

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Select Readings (just click on them to access):

• Andrew Winston, “Is the Business Roundtable Statement Just Empty Rhetoric?” Harvard Business Review, August 30, 2019

• Robert B. Reich, “How the Corporate Raiders Led to Trump,” Substack, May 12, 2025

• Bethany McLean, “Too Big to Fail, COVID-19 Edition: How Private Equity Is Winning the Coronavirus Crisis,” Vanity Fair, April 9, 2020

• Neil Irwin, “To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider the Janitors at Two Top Companies, Then and Now,” The New York Times, September 3, 2017

• Miniter, “Al Dunlap and the Shareholder Revolution,” American Enterprise, November 1996, pp 82-83

If you’d like to have access to more readings and handouts, you can visit the full course website here.

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