The Dull Rich Death of American Cities

“Now comes plutocratisation: the middle classes and small companies are falling victim to class-cleansing. Global cities are becoming patrician ghettos. In 2009, says [Columbia University’s Saskia] Sassen, the top 1 per cent of New York City’s earners got 44 per cent of the compensation paid to its workers. The ‘super-prime housing market’ keeps rising even when the national economy collapses. After Manhattan, New York’s upper-middle classes are being priced out of Brooklyn. Sassen diagnoses ‘gradual destruction.’ Global cities are turning into vast gated communities where the one per cent reproduces itself.”

— This is why I like my theory that “Game of Thrones” is actually set in the future and London and New York and Paris are all the gross slave cities.