John Robb on the Citibank Plutonomy memo referenced in Capitalism: A Love Story
Citibank report. In short, the idea is that globalization will continue to accelerate income concentration at the expense of the bottom 90% of the population in developed countries (winner take all, ala Taleb). The good side (as they see it), is that the spending of the top 10% might become sufficient to supplant the demand generated by the bottom 90% (that spending is already 40% of all US consumption). If this does occur, the result would be a seamless transition to a new social order of globally competitive elites and a vast pool of undifferentiated global labor (available at the same normative price). Of course, as the events of the last year show, this type of societal configuration is highly unstable and prone to very bad extremistan outcomes.