Chuck Collins and Linda McQuaig

Cambridge Forum welcomes senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies CHUCK COLLINS and award-winning journalist LINDA MCQUAIG as part of their Spring series, "How We Live Now."

For many years Chuck Collins has been a top leader in studying, speaking about, and writing about these questions. In this book he brings together in one place, for the first time, information that has been widely scattered in many different articles, reports, and websites. He provides revealing and powerful information about inequality in all realms of today’s world, including individual wealth and power, corporate wealth and power, media control, political influence, and other areas. He then describes the functioning of the Wall Street Inequality Machine and describes how inequality wrecks everything we care about. And he tells how people and groups are pushing back against inequality and taking action to reduce inequality and create a world that works for the many and not just the few.

In Billionaires' Ball, Linda McQuaig takes us back in history to the political decisions that helped birth our billionaires, then move us forward to the cutting-edge research into the dangers that concentrated wealth poses. Via vivid profiles of billionaires—ranging from philanthropic capitalists such as Bill Gates to hedge fund king John Paulson and the infamous band of Koch brothers—Billionaires' Ball illustrates why we hold dearly to the belief that they "earned" and "deserve" their grand fortunes, when such wealth is really a by-product of a legal and economic infrastructure that's become deeply flawed.