The rise of the deserving rich

What it means here:The article is drawing a line between two different feelings. People have always been a bit suspicious of the very rich — that is the "never exactly been popular" part. What is new, the writer says, is something much hotter: an active disgust, the kind of feeling that shows up in campaign slogans and fundraising emails.

In general:To loathe something is to hate it with a feeling of disgust — not just to dislike it or find it annoying, but to find it repellent. It is one of the strongest words in English for dislike, so it loses its force if you spend it on small things.

What it means here:Notice how careful this word is. The writer is talking about people who inherited their billions and is saying: you could reasonably make the case against them. It is not "they definitely are policy failures" — it is "that argument holds together." The word marks the difference between a claim being arguable and a claim being proved.

In general:Plausibly means in a way that seems reasonable or believable, based on what we know. It signals that something is worth taking seriously — but stops short of saying it is true. (The related adjective is plausible.)

What it means here:The writer has just introduced the founder of Uniqlo, worth tens of billions of dollars, and is asking the reader a pointed question. He is not asking whether the man is rich — he obviously is. He is asking whether you can resent him for it, when what he did to get rich was sell you something you were glad to buy.

In general:To begrudge someone something is to resent that they have it — to feel they don't deserve it, or to give it grudgingly. You can begrudge a person their money, their luck, their praise, or even the time you spend helping them.

This is one of the big organising ideas in economics, and once you have it you will see it everywhere. Economists split money-making into two kinds. Value creation is getting paid because you made something people actually wanted. Rent-seeking is getting paid because you control a position other people aren't allowed to compete for.

Picture two lemonade stands on the same street. The first one wins by making better lemonade — colder, cheaper, with real lemons. If you want to beat it, you can: make yours better. The second one wins differently. Its owner is friends with whoever hands out permits, and there is now exactly one permit for the whole street. That lemonade can be mediocre and warm and it will still sell, because you are not allowed to open a stand next to it. The word "rent" here is an old economics term — it doesn't mean apartment rent, it means the extra money you can charge purely because nobody is permitted to undercut you.

That distinction is exactly what this article is built on. When it sorts billionaires into "competitive" and "uncompetitive" industries, it is really asking: did this person have to win customers, or did they just have to win permission? Selling T-shirts, scoring goals, and running a restaurant chain all require millions of people to keep choosing you, and they can stop tomorrow. Opening a casino or a mine usually requires a government's permission, and once you have it, no one can take your customers by simply doing the job better.

The useful habit is to ask it of any rich person or successful company you read about: what would happen if a rival tried to compete with them tomorrow? If the answer is "they'd have to be better," that's value creation. If the answer is "they'd be blocked," that's rent-seeking.

This idea comes from finance and accounting, where it goes by the technical name mark-to-market. Here's the thing it fixes in your head: when you read that someone is "worth $60 billion," there is no vault with $60 billion in it. Almost none of that is money. It is a multiplication — the number of company shares they own, times what one share sold for today.

That second number is set by strangers trading with each other, which means a person's fortune moves enormously while they sit perfectly still. Elon Musk, the article notes, "briefly became the world's first trillionaire" and then wasn't one anymore. He didn't spend it. SpaceX's share price fell, and the multiplication produced a smaller answer. Wang Jianlin was worth $31bn in 2017 and $4.4bn now, mostly for the same reason in reverse — Chinese property prices sank and took his number with them.

You already know this feeling from anything you collect. A rare skin or a graded card is "worth $400" because that's what the last one sold for. Your card sat in a drawer all week and did nothing, and now the tracker says $250. You are $150 poorer without having done a single thing — and you don't actually have either number until someone hands you cash for it.

This matters for reading the news. It explains why billionaire rankings lurch around, why a decade of rising stock markets creates billionaires without anyone inventing anything new that year, and why "tax their wealth" is harder than it sounds: you would be taxing a number that only becomes real when they sell.