Evan Osnos

Compared to Europeans, for instance, we tend to be more willing to believe that inequality is the natural outgrowth of capitalism.

But that number is changing, and it's changing in important ways.

What you notice is that today there's an almost equal number of Americans, according to polls, who will tell you that billionaires are, as they say, bad for society, they create unfairness, and the same number of Americans who want to become billionaires themselves.

But what's notable is that these numbers are different among younger people.

So Gen Z, for instance, has a lower tolerance for dramatic inequality and for the very visible effects of these giant fortunes than their parents and grandparents did.

And this is a reflection of exactly the changes over the last generation that we've been talking about.

Well, as a general idea, this has been around since the Russian Revolution in 1917.

But in recent years, it's become much more explicit.

It was really around 2019 that we began to hear that idea.

This was in the latter moments of the first Trump administration.

And Bernie Sanders was running for president.

And he was talking about the idea that, as he said at the time, very clearly in his mind, billionaires shouldn't exist.

And then you had Elizabeth Warren talking about a policy platform that would involve a wealth tax.

So you follow that up to the present, and the idea has become now much more broadly felt in progressive policy circles that, to borrow a phrase,

Every billionaire is a policy failure.

That is where it's come.

And Zoran Mamdani's campaign was, in a sense, the most dramatic example of that because it was, after all, unfolding right there in the financial capital of the United States, New York City.

I think it's pretty clear that it's actually now in a crescendo.

It's becoming much more a part of everyday conversation.

The example you gave of Billie Eilish talking about this coming from a pop culture perspective is really noticeable, and it's for a few reasons.