Great Divide
By BOB HERBERT
A public high school teacher in Brooklyn told me recently about a student who didn’t believe that a restaurant tab for four people could come to more than $500. The student shook his head, as if resisting the very idea. He just couldn’t fathom it.
“How much can you eat?” the student asked. When I asked a teacher in a second school to mention the same issue, one of the responses was, “Is this a true story?”
A lot of New Yorkers are doing awfully well. There are 8 million residents of New York City, and roughly 700,000 are worth a million dollars or more. The average price of a Manhattan apartment is $1.3 million. The annual earnings of the average hedge fund manager is $363 million.
The estimated worth of the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, ranges from $5.5 billion to upwards of $20 billion.
You want a gilded age? This is it. The elite of the Roaring Twenties would be stunned by the wealth of the current era.
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Bob Herbert Two Americas Inequality News Politics Class
