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You're listening to the Monocle Daily, first broadcast on 25th September 2025 on Monocle Radio.
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Palestine's president addresses from a distance a UN General assembly which recognises his country slightly more than it once did. Russia issues pre emptive denial regarding drones plaguing Danish airports. And US President Donald Trump strikes another resonant blow in the service of the dignity of the office he occupies. I'm Andrew Muller. The Monocle Daily starts now. FOREIGN hello and welcome to the Monocle Daily, coming to you from our studios here at Midori House in London. I'm Andrew Muller. My guests Julie Norman and Carol Walker will discuss today's big stories. And we'll hear from New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos about his new book chronicling his safaris among the super wealthy. Stay tuned. All that and more coming up right here on the Monocle Daily. This is the Monocle Daily. I'm Andrew Muller and I am joined today by Julie Norman, Associate professor of Politics and International Relations at UCL and co author of the upcoming book the Dream and the Nightmare. And Carol Walker, Times radio presenter, political commentator, former BBC correspondent. Hello to you both.
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C
Hello.
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A
Yeah, good evening, Carol.
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B
Let's talk very briefly about British domestic political matters because we won't be elsewhere in the show. You are all psyched up for the Labour Party conference this weekend. You've even got a red shirt on already.
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A
Yeah. Getting ready to head up there this weekend and it's going to be fascinating. It is extraordinary how you think that this is a Labour government that only a year and a bit ago won a stonking great majority.
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B
They did.
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A
And now it's really in deep trouble. Keir Starmer basically doesn't seem to do anything right. They're facing a huge problem of trying to make the sums add up, although he's been deemed to have done reasonably well on the world stage, apart from annoying Donald Trump over recognition of Palestine, which I know that we're going to talk about in a minute. But the latest issue is about benefits. There's a two child limit on certain benefits. There's a real head of steam brewing within his party over that and saying that they need to scrap that. That's another 3 billion when they already haven't got any money. We've got a mayor of Greater Manchester who failed in his last two previous leadership bids, who's suddenly being seen as the next potential challenger.
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B
This is like a recurring natural phenomenon in British politics, though. It's like Old faithful going off in Yellowstone. The Andy Burnham leadership bid you'd almost.
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A
Think we had a Tory government, wouldn't you? It's the same kind of rather familiar sense of a psychodrama. And he's pulled his rabbit out of the hat just today. The idea that we're gonna have compulsory digital ID cards, let me just say that I suspect may not be the solution to Labour's problems. That may not bring him the massive boost in the polls which he desperately needs. It's going to be, I think, quite a lively week.
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B
Well, indeed so, and we look forward to hearing more about it. Julie, by way of easing us into our first topic, you can go ahead and plug the heck out of that book, which I have by now read. And my conscience is therefore completely at ease about letting you use this valuable platform to sell it, listeners. It's genuinely very good.
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C
Thank you, Andrew. There's a lot coming from so right back at you with your book. My book, the Dream and the Nightmare, will be out on October 24th. And if you're someone who, like all of us, is just following what's going on in Gaza and just trying to understand what the context of all this was, what Gaza was like before, how the conflict got to this point, pick up our book.
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B
Well, we will start on that note at the United Nations General assembly in New York City, which has today heard from, among others, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. President Abbas spoke via video link as he couldn't be there in person, literally so as the United States refused to issue him a visa, though he appeared at the UNGA last year and in many years before without say, embarrassing himself and his nation by wittering interminably about wind farms. Abbas's speech today said pretty much what might have been expected, accusing Israel of crimes against humanity and reiterating that he saw no role for Hamas in any post war governance of Gaza. Julie, anything especially surprising here?
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C
Not a lot of surprises in this speech and I would note also he already spoke, spoke earlier this week at the Israel Palestine kind of two state summit which was also part of the unga, and the speeches were similar. But I would say the points that you just pulled out, this condemnation of the attacks of October 7, calling on Hamas to disarm, these are major things for him to say amongst Palestinians and he takes a lot of flack on the ground for saying publicly these comments, even from many people who don't support Hamas, these kinds of statements from the PA president are very controversial. So he does put himself, I would say, far out there in making these statements, even at somewhere like the unga. But it's obviously in the context we're in now. He's riding this wave of Palestinian recognition and I think wants things to continue on that path as much as possible.
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B
Quick follow up on that, Julie. Among Palestinians you've spoken to, especially on the west bank, how legitimate a president is Abbas regarded? He's very old by this point. He's 89. I think we can use the phrase unregenerate crook without too much concern about hearing, hearing from his lawyers. And he is four, he's now 20 years, rather into his first four year term.
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C
Yeah, I would say, I mean, abysmal. I mean, if you can, if there's any word to say how poorly a politician is doing. Abbas is at that level. He has never been popular since the day he was, you know, kind of in office 20 years ago. I have never seen approval ratings for him as low as they are now. Talking to people across the political spectrum, extreme disillusionment, extreme frustration with Abass right.
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B
Now, Carol, as a diplomatic maneuver, what do we of the US revoking the visas for President Abbas and indeed the entire Palestinian delegation so they couldn't come. Is there an argument, and we might call it the Jimmy Kimmel effect, that this just raised interest in what Mahmoud Abbas had to say today? And on that front, Abbas does need all the help he can get because among the many talents he does not possess, a riveting public speaker is one of them.
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A
Well, indeed. I mean, working out President Trump's motives is always quite a tricky one. But it does appear to be a further gesture of his continued support for Benjamin Netanyahu, who clearly does not want to see any legitimate role for any kind of Palestinian state. I mean, what I've been struck by this week is that, and last week as well, is there was such a sense of how significant. It was certainly here in the UK that the British government had decided publicly to declare its support for a Palestinian state, along with France, with Canada, with Australia, whilst at the same time we had on the ground in Gaza, Israeli forces simply pressing further into Gaza City. Today they've closed the only crossing between the west bank and Jordan. Just the outright rejection that there seems to have been so far from Israel's Prime Minister to any sense of a move to try to formulate some wider concept of moving towards a peaceful solution. I mean, the gulf between the two just seems to be dramatic. Although we have had, as we were just discussing a moment ago, this meeting this week between President Trump, Arab leaders and there is this supposed peace plan put together by the former British Prime Minister Tony BLAIR by the U.S. president's son in law, Jared Kushner, which seems to be gaining some traction. The one person who doesn't seem to be paying any attention to it so far it is Benjamin Netanyahu.
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B
Palestine has this week, Julie and there is more on this in the current Foreign Desk explainer, which people can download as soon as they're done listening to this. There's been that spate of big ticket recognitions of Palestine. It's important to emphasize that most of the UN had long since recognized Palestine, but most of Israel's traditional Western allies, the Western sphere, had held out Europe, the United States, Australia, Japan, et cetera. Almost, well, not almost all those countries, but a Bunch I think 10 this week. A lot of them quite small micronations in Europe, but some big ones, the U.K. france, Portugal, Canada, Australia. Does that actually make any difference to anything?
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C
You know, I think for the reasons that Carol was just saying, we need to be clear eyed about the fact that those moves won't change things on the ground immediately. They're not going to bring an end to the war in Gaza. They're not going to change the situation in the West Bank. But just because something is symbolic doesn't mean it's not meaningful. And I think it does just show the commitments of states like the uk, like Australia, the international community, to this concept of Palestinian self determination at a moment when it's perhaps never been more threatened, at least in kind of our current times, and does put Palestine on some kind of more equal footing in the international arena for any future rounds of negotiations that can and someday actually will take place. And I do think there provides a grounding for other more tangible steps to happen. If you were saying you're recognizing the sovereignty of Palestine, it puts more of an onus on your state than to take a stronger stance on goods from settlements, to take a stronger stance on the use of arms in those territories, et cetera. So it opens the door for more meaningful policies.
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B
Well, to Denmark now, where once again marooned air passengers may be tuning into this the Monocle daily to while away a portion of a drone inflicted delay after Copenhagen airport was closed on Monday due to drone activity. The airports of Alborg and Billund have been similarly beleaguered. Three smaller Danish airports also reported drone activity. Denmark says that the drone deployments appear to have been the work of professionals, but have not as yet said which professionals they believe them to have been. Although intriguingly, Russia denied everything. Anyway, Carol, is it actually surprising that this sort of thing doesn't happen more often. And should we get accustomed to the idea that it's going to as drone technology becomes cheaper, easier to maneuver, et cetera. There was also, of course, a different sort of thing, but a cyber attack on Berlin's airport this week.
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A
Well, look, I think what is interesting here, Andrew, is that this is not just one or two stray drones. What we've seen over the last week or two is what appeared to be systematic incursions into the airspace of NATO countries, into Poland, Estonia, Romania. Those were all pretty clearly carried out by the Russians, as you say. There's no definitive evidence so far that what has happened over the skies of Denmark is the work of the Russians. But it's quite clear that this is part of a pattern. And what is fascinating here, I think, is the discussions that are going on as to how NATO should respond to this, because President Putin clearly is testing NATO's resolve here. He's clearly trying to say, listen, you guys can get together with Trump, you can talk about your support for Ukraine and so on, but we, the Russians, are still flexing our military might here. Let's not forget that ever since that very profile meeting between President Putin and President Trump, Putin hasn't moved one inch towards any kind of concessions whatsoever. And I think that this does present a real challenge to NATO and certainly in places like Poland, who are right there pretty much on the front line, there is a very strong political drive for saying, well, perhaps we should be moving towards actually starting to shoot these things down and certainly towards NATO developing a strategy whereby they could, for example, say to Russia, okay, this time we now have evidence that you, the Russians, were responsible to this incursion into Poland's airspace. We don't accept your excuse that this was a slight mistake. And if it happens, and we're putting you on notice if it happens again, that we're going to shoot the thing down. Now, we haven't reached that stage yet. And of course, there are other voices within NATO that are saying, hang on, that would take us into direct confrontation with Russia. But I think that this is a real point of brinkmanship between NATO and Russia.
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B
Might the countries being plagued by drones, though, Julie, rather, also be a bit concerned about establishing a precedent by shooting them down? If they commit themselves to doing that every single time, then if we assume that this is Russia, then Russia then has an absolute license, if you will, to print mayhem. Because if they think every time we send over a drone, which cost us, I don't know, a few thousand dollars at most, and they feel obliged to scramble billion dollar fighter aircraft and launch missiles worth hundreds of thousands at them. This is just fun for us.
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C
Yeah, absolutely. It's a challenge for states right now to know how to respond to drone technology because there's not a very good defense system for it. So a lot of states are still using their much more heavy weapons, their much more expensive weapons. And drones, meanwhile, they're extremely cheap to produce, they're relatively easy to produce. It's easy to get them in the hands of non state actors to kind of carry out your dirty work for it does risk kind of reeling in states to kind of use up more of their defence capabilities than is really necessary when drones are sometimes just kind of annoying.
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B
Well, they are exactly that. And there's a question here about just domestic aviation security as well, isn't there Carol? Cause I mean, any idiot who could be bothered could close an airport for at least a certain period. I'm not recommending people do that, but it's easily done. I mean, you think back to the Gatwick airport incident of 2018, when that airport was shut from for days and it's still actually unclear whether there in fact were any drones at all. There were either a small number of amateur drones, no one was ever caught, or some sort of hysteria gripped the airport authorities.
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A
I think there is clearly a risk of this. And of course there are all kinds of different people and societies that these days use drones. They use drones for geological surveys and so on. And they only have to get into the hands of someone with not even malicious intent, but maybe mischievous intent to be, to potentially provoke those sorts of difficulties. But I think the other interesting point in what is happening here is that it does, if you like, validate what President Zelenskyy was saying at the United nations this week, which is, look, it's better for you allies of Ukraine to confront Russia now than have to try to build these massive defences yourself to protect your own territory, your own airspace from future Russian aggression. And I think that there is a slight risk that what President Putin is doing here, and it seems pretty clear to me that this is what he's doing in Denmark, that that could actually help to strengthen the resolve of NATO allies behind Ukraine.
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B
Might we approach a point, Julie, at which some country perhaps in Denmark's position, does get tempted to call Russia's bluff? Again, to be clear, no one knows as yet where these drones came from. And to be clear, Russia denies everything, but Russia always denies everything. There is some suggestion that they might have been launched from ships belonging to Russia's so called ghost fleet, the deniable tankers which cruise in and out of the Baltic. If a given European country was able to furnish definitive proof that that was in fact the launch site for drones, would their navy be justified in sending those ships to the bottom?
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C
I believe that NATO would see that definitely as justified. And that would be a more kind of targeted response, I think, to this. And again, I think the question is going to be the scale and the degree if this is a one off thing, if this is, you know, a random flyover. But as Carol said, if this becomes a, what Denmark is already calling it, a systematic attack, if this is repeated, if this is in coordination with other airspace violations in other states, NATO can't just keep sitting and kind of waiting for the next hit. There's going to have to be some kind of response. And as Carol said, as resolve, as resolve kind of bolsters, I think they're going to be looking at all options.
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B
Well, to Washington D.C. now, specifically the White House. And another demonstration of the statesmanlike gravitas for which US President Donald Trump has become justly renowned. A walk of fame has been added rather to the exterior of the West Wing, A gold framed portrait of each previous occupant of the Oval Office. Except, except that. And listeners may at this point wish to clutch their sides to prevent them from splitting. President Joe Biden is represented not by the standard head and shoulders portrait in front of a flag, but an auto pen signing his name. This is a nod to President Trump's. Trump's morbid obsession with Biden's use of such an instrument and the associated, if unevidenced allegations that Biden's staff occasionally helped themselves to its executive power. Julie, pet theory. First, about the Walk of Fame before we get onto the Biden portrait. I think Trump did this because he knew fine well that he would get two pictures of himself, him and Garfield anyway.
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C
Well, and it's, there are two pictures with the pen in between right now. So it's even like more eye catching. And I mean, I think he put it up there like right largely dev2 of himself. I think he loved this idea of doing this pen with Biden. And I think he like, I think he mentioned this in like a podcast a couple weeks ago and got such a response to the comment that it was like, yeah, let's just do it. And I will say, like, I think for a lot of people of Americans and people around the world who don't understand Trump's appeal, like, I think For a lot of his base it's antics like this that they find very appealing that he will do things that are so uncouth like so like outside the norm of tradition but can actually be quite like funny and humorous. If you're like in on the joke and if you also like thought the same things about Biden, who do you.
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B
Think it does appeal to though? I mean presumably there are people besides Donald Trump who find this funny.
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A
Well look, I think of all the things that President Trump has done, I think at least this one does show a little bit of imagination and humor. Look, this plays to one of Donald Trump's pet themes of how terrible a President Joe Biden was. He wastes no opportunity to throw out derisory comments about him. But I think Julie has a point that it plays to his MAGA base. But I think it's also one of these things that's going to get picked up online. It's gonna talked about on the mon daily, talked about on Monocle Daily on social media. It's gonna play into there'll be some little clever memes on all of it. It gets greater pick up and it's, it is that classic thing of this is a president who doesn't feel he needs to play by the rules. He feels he can, he doesn't have to follow the traditions. He's somebody who likes, who's in touch with the way other people communic, a little bit of humor. And I happen to think that this is probably, you know, one of the, one of the, as I say, one of the slightly more imaginative little devices that President Trump has done and probably a lot more acceptable than immediately accusing the Democrats of being behind a shooting, for example, which it perhaps takes us into different territory.
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B
Julie, I should before I press on, correct my early interjection. It was of course Cleveland, not Garfield, who was the previous non consecutive president and who I assume has two pictures on the walk of fame. There is always the question with obvious trolling like this though, Julian. This is obvious trolling about whether the target of it responds disappointingly as we go to where we have not seen from any of Joe Biden's social media accounts an auto pen simply writing release the Epstein files. But is this something you should actually engage with or do you just ignore him and the hope he goes away? Because the obvious compare and contrast is Governor Governor Gavin Newsom of California does appear to be getting to Trump with his Trump pastiches.
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C
Yeah, I mean I think because again one thing that people get on the Democrats in The US is cuz they don't have a sense of humor. So I think playing, playing ball with something like this and having some fun with it and they kind of did this in the past with, with Biden. I think with like the dark brand and stuff, they kind of like took over that meme and like made it a joke and, and yeah, I mean to me, doing stuff with the auto pen right now would actually be like a really good move on this part to say like, yeah, we're in on it too. We get it. Like let's. And not let you have the final say.
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B
Carol, as we watched the footage of the Walk of Fame unfurling, was I the only one holding my breath as it approached Barack Obama?
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A
Yeah, I mean you did wonder whether he might, you know, pencil a little mustache on or something like that.
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B
I was thinking maybe, you know, Photoshop him into Masai costume or have the Kenyan flag hanging in the background. But he seems to have got off quite lightly.
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A
Yeah, I mean, I'm surprised. Maybe he will look at quite how much coverage the auto pen for Biden has got and maybe expand that. Maybe we'll see it going back a little further. I should say that Barack Obama has been over here in London and he was chatting for an hour or so, got an audience of some 30,000 people at a big arena. So he's still got one or two fans left here.
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B
And just finally on this. Julie, this is the bit where of course we get you to speak on behalf of, of your people entire. What have you made of the. And this is clearly a part of that, the accelerated gilding of the West Wing. It is because every time Trump sits in it, it's even more gold than it was last week. And I am just reminded more and more of the interiors, weirdly specifically the bathrooms of Saddam Hussein's palaces that I visited in Baghdad and Basra shortly after he ceased having any use for them.
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C
It is getting a bit cartoonish. I mean, happily I have not been there to see them. The pictures. I saw a picture, I was like, oh wait, that's what everyone's talking about, this gilding. Like it really is. It really is taking on a whole nother level of. I just, I'm waiting for like, I don't know, gold garden gnomes out in the Rose Garden or something like that. It's just like the gold everywhere is definitely a new look. But yes, I think it does have some imperial palatial themes going on.
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B
I do worry that you've given them ideas to South Korea now specifically Seoul where Taiwanese tourists, tourists are using shopping center bathrooms for free. Stick with us. A Taiwanese social media user has somehow compiled then uploaded the access codes to bathrooms in the major shopping centers of Hongdai. These are usually restricted to paying customers and accessible only by code supplied on production of a receipt. It says here that quite the brouhaha has been occasioned between purse lipped property rights types arguing in favor of store policy and blue, blue haired anarchists praising this liberation of information. Carol, do you think anyone's just thought of changing the codes? I mean presumably that's possible.
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A
Well look, I'm just slightly horrified by the fact that you've got to have access codes to use the bathroom.
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B
Not unheard of in London cafes, like things like the big chain cafes, sandwich shops.
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A
It does happen and it's one of the things that annoys me here. I mean look, if everybody just had decent bathroom facilities and opened them up to everybody, there wouldn't be a problem, would that? I mean because you wouldn't have queues of people waiting to use them so you wouldn't have the overcrowding that this is allegedly there to try to prevent. I'm just horrified at the whole idea of this and I think if somebody's managed to find a little app that can help people to unlock them, well good on them. You know, we've got to stop this ridiculous kind of, of possessiveness about a facility that everybody's going to need to use at some stage.
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B
But is it arguable, Julie, that the problem is not so much the facilities themselves but the people who may use them for nefarious purposes? I mean it's fairly obvious that the reasons that codes are imposed on things like you know, sandwich shops and cafes in the centre of London is that they're trying to keep drug addicts out of them.
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C
Well yeah, and I do think that's one reason why especially in urban centers, you see that. I think what was. I mean because there are other things like this, like toilet codes anyone? I mean there's like these things are out there. But like I think what was interesting with this one too, it was point like department stores and stuff. Like I can see a cafe, like you have to go buy a bottle of water but I'm not gonna like buy a toaster just because I need to like pee or something. And like as someone who like always has to go, I'm just like give me the code, I will do anything. But like, but I do think like there's a reason why they have them but also if you need to go, you need to go. And there's kind of a balance there.
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B
Is there not an argument here in favor, though, Carol, of their protecting their staff by keeping, keeping ne' er do wells off the premises?
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A
Look, there clearly is a concern here, as you say, about people using these facilities for nefarious purposes. The staff have to have it. But I mean, you know, this is something that surely those shops have got to try and approach in a sensible way. And, you know, it seems to me that if you have not nice facilities, you treat them properly, you make them open to everyone. People seem less likely to do that if you've got some kind of ghastly, rather unpleasant place, which are the sort that tend to have the code on them, that that's what seems to attract people to them in the first place. But maybe I'm just being a little bit too naive about the whole issue here. But, you know, scrap the codes, let's have apps, let's get round it all and then, you know, maybe we'll all get better facilities.
- [27:34]
C
It could just go back. Remember in the old days you get a key with like a huge like ladle or like small car, like attached to it. You had to like take to the bathroom with you. Like, they just go back to that.
- [27:43]
B
Well, on that constructive thought, Julie Norman and Carol Walker, thank you both for joining us. Finally, on today's show, the extremely wealthy get very little sympathy. This is because they don't deserve any. And at any rate, if they really want any, they can doubtless hire professional sympathisers. Nevertheless, by accident or design, the colossally minted have incarcerated themselves in a remote, strange and antiseptic world to which the rest of us are generally denied admission for fear we may wipe our noses on a Picasso or something. New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos has inveigled himself further into their palaces than most, and his bleakly hilarious accounts of encounters with people with more money than they can spend form the basis of his new book, the Haves and have Dispatches on the Ultra Rich. I spoke to Evan earlier and began by asking if he'd acquired any conclusions on how have having that much money affects a person psychologically.
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D
I had the sense over time that it is a compounding effect, meaning that once you begin to enter into the realm of experience, that allows you, for instance, to fly on private aircraft or perhaps pick up a super yacht for half a billion dollars. And, you know, perhaps you also start to hear from your friends that maybe we, we should be preparing for the end of the world. And so you get a little hideaway in New Zealand. The compounding power is that you are almost amazingly secluded within the realm of like minded practitioners. And so it's quite easy to drift off from, shall we say, the terrestrial experience of the rest of us and end up in a self justifying, self reinforcing realm.
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B
I mean, do they psychologically though, detach themselves from the real world as they may have experienced it? Because one of the people you meet is Mark Zuckerberg, proprietor of Facebook, founder of Meta, etc. Who is one of the richest people now who has ever lived. But it wasn't always the case. He had, admittedly until an early point in his life, but a reasonably normal upbringing. Is he still in touch with any of that at all?
- [29:55]
D
Well, that's an important point. I mean, he had a fairly conventional suburban upbringing. His father is a dangerous dentist. And then when he was in his teens, as a student in college, he invented this little website, you'll recall, and we all know the story of it. And it became so big so fast that he dropped out and he ended up accumulating the scale of his reach. I mean, just a customer base that is larger, for instance, than Christianity, means that he's able to surround himself with people of his choosing, lieutenants that he's handpicked, and try as he might to stay attached to the rest of the world. And he's done it occasionally, for instance, by going out into the world. He once announced that he would try to meet a new person every year. And so people were sort of brought before him in a bit of a, kind of felt to me like a papal audience or sort of, you know, the way the Dalai Lama receives guests. And it makes it very hard because as somebody said later that, you know, that experience of meeting ordinary people was pretty widely mocked online because the photos showed him, for instance, milking a cow or joining an assembly line. And it had the feeling of a Martian who was coming to meet these people and to see how they shall live. And so it was very hard, try as he might, to be normal.
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B
Did it feel like that to you though, that you were one of the people trying to explain Earth to a visiting Martian? Or I guess when talking to Zuckerberg and others, is there any part of you that is intimidated by the fact that this person you're talking to could buy your house at, then burn it down for a laugh and not notice the money was missing?
- [31:34]
D
I think the experience of interviewing people in this environment is very strange in some ways because There is this extraordinary asymmetry of experience where the power that they have with one keystroke is really beyond our reckoning. I mean, just to give you a literal example, I mean, in Mark Zuckerberg case, they set up something on Facebook that allowed you to announce that you had voted in the most recent election. And what they discovered was that it added 340,000 votes, which is enough to tilt the balance in many American states. But no, I didn't find it intimidating because this is an age old encounter between who is the power of money and who is ultimately there on behalf of the public. I mean, that's what the reporter's role is. So I was grateful, frankly, that I was reporting in this realm at a time when it felt as if that collision between the power of money and the power of the citizenry was very much hanging in the balance.
- [32:39]
B
Well, yeah, you do illustrate that with that tableau of Donald Trump's second inauguration in which he takes the oath in front of, of a Praetorian guard of some of America's and therefore the world's, and indeed all of human history's richest people. But I guess a more interesting question because most of our listeners will not probably ever have to reckon with the psychological effects of being worth several billion dollars. But all of us, of course, have to reckon with the effects of living in a world that these people will not just influence, but dominate. Where did you get to on how that could be possibly ameliorated? Did you end up at the end of these essays becoming an absol lion for taxes on wealth, inheritance, whatever?
- [33:23]
D
Well, I came to see a few things. I mean, one is you simply can't talk about this topic intelligently without talking about tax and without talking about the ways that we pay or don't pay people in our society. And the patterns on this are quite clear to us. I think we all know that, whether we know the statistics or not, that to put a fine point on it, the 400 wealthiest Americans today have an effective tax, tax rate that is half what they paid half a century ago. So that is the effect of accumulated political decisions. But I also came to the larger belief that culture is upstream of politics, meaning, Andrew, that I think that before you can choose to make better, more sustainable political decisions here in Washington, you actually have, have to change the way that the public, both at the very top of the income scale and across society, how people think about what's fair, what's right and what's logical. Because until quite recently, there's been a. I'D say there's been a kind of a celebration of unbounded wealth accumulation in this country. I mean, we see it in the form of Elon Musk and certainly in the presidency of the Donald Trump. But you see absolutely clearly in the data about American attitudes that people are getting quite fed up. And so, on the one hand, they still wanna get rich. This is the American dream. But they're becoming much more alert and aware of the reasons why they're not getting rich.
- [34:54]
B
Do you think, though, that the billionaire class are somewhat protected by the fact that. I think most people's imaginations fail them with numbers past a certain point, and I don't exclude myself from that. I mean, I can imagine what it would be like to have 10 million qu. I can imagine what I would do with 10 million quid. And I'm sure it's a perfectly pleasant problem to have. I've got almost no conception of what a billion pounds would actually mean and the kind of life you could live with that.
- [35:22]
D
Absolutely. And it's interesting, actually. Warren Buffett is one of the few billionaires who talks candidly about this. Call it almost the numerical illegibility of it. He says, I have an almost incomprehensible amount of money. I mean, it's gotten to the point where he's trying to give away his fortune philanthropically in his 90s, but it keeps growing by sheer arithmetic, momentum, because the larger your fortune is, the faster it grows at that point. And he can't give it away fast enough. And that is something that's very hard for us to observe. And I will tell you, Andrew, it's not just because the numbers are big by historical standards. They're really almost beyond anything we've ever had. I spoke to archiac archaeologists for this book who have studied inequality back to the Neolithic age, and they say, well, it's quite true, actually, that we are living in a period of inequality that is, as one archaeologist put it to me, perhaps greater than it was during the age of the building of the Egyptian pyramids. So it's not our imagination. This really is almost incomprehensible. Gaps.
- [36:28]
B
I do have to ask, finally thinking about one absolutely lovely line in the book where you're ensconced in a very swish yacht club club in Monaco and you talk about experiencing, and I quote, the unmistakable pang of superiority, was there any part of you that came to feel genuinely envious of the people you were writing about?
- [36:50]
D
Well, there was certainly a part of me that said I should really sustain my research as long as humanly possible until my editors yank me home. But no, it wasn't about envy for me. It was almost anthropological. I just came to believe believe that like other countries I've written about and other moments in history that fascinate me, we are living through something really strange by historical standards. And I wanted to describe it as evocatively and as detailed as possible because I think it's I kind of put myself in the shoes of some future historian trying to understand how how did they live in the beginning of the 21st century? And either why did it all come undone or why did they find their way through it? That's the question I was trying to answer.
- [37:37]
B
That was New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos. His new book is the Haves and have Dispatches on the Ultra Rich. Very much recommended. And that is all for this edition of the Monocle Daily. Thanks to our panelists today, Julie Norman and Carol Walker. Today's show was produced by Hassan Anderson and researched by Daniela Brauer Smith. Our sound engineer was Mariella Bevan. I'm Andrew Muller here in London. The Daily is back at the same time tomorrow. Thanks for listening, Sam.