China’s wealth gap has widened so much that the country now one of the most unequal outside of sub-Saharan Africa. A respected Chinese institute found this week that China’s Gini coefficient, a number that represents income inequality, has soared from 0.41 a decade ago to 0.61 today. Anything over 0.5 is considered to be destabilizing, and South Africa, where opulent […]
Read more
“With money you can buy a house, but not a home. With money you can buy a clock, but not time. With money you can buy a book, but not knowledge. With money you can buy blood, but not life. With money you can buy sex, but not love.”
Read more
Hidden Cash was a 2014 multi-city project founded by Jason Buzi and Yan Budman using the Twitter account of the same name. On May 22, 2014, Hidden Cash began hiding money in San Francisco, California and tweeting out clues using the handle. Followers were encouraged to tweet a photo of themselves with the money they found, and Hidden Cash retweeted […]
Read more
How did the U.S. debt get so high? The crucial turning point came back in 2001, said Lori Montgomery. At the time, Uncle Sam was actually running surpluses, and “the outlook was so rosy” that forecasters were predicting the U.S. could pay back every dime it had ever borrowed. That’s when President George W. Bush made a pivotal decision: Rather […]
Read more
■ The 15-year-old son of an accused mugger met this week with his father’s alleged victim to make amends. Christian Lunsford sought out Tona Herndon—who had her purse snatched while visiting her late husband’s gravesite in Bethany, Okla.—after learning that his father, Shane, had been arrested for the crime. The teenager met with Herndon to apologize and give back $250 […]
Read more
Roger Pasquier hunts for coins on NYC sidewalks and keeps track of how much he finds. He discovered an odd consequence of everyone having a smartphone: people don’t pick up change on the sidewalk anymore. From 1987 to 2006, he averaged about fifty-eight dollars a year. Then Apple introduced the iPhone, and millions of potential competitors started to stare at […]
Read more