This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Have you ever wondered what it's like to be rich?
I'm taking Oliver for a detox in the hamptons.
Standardized testing has really stressed him out.
Really rich.
Why are you wearing a tux?
It's after six.
What am I, a farmer?
Extreme wealth is something that few of us will experience.
We'll never jet somewhere on a private plane.
We'll never employ a butler or own a mansion on a secluded island.
The gap between the uber wealthy and the rest of us, already massive, is growing.
Due in part to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The richest 10% of people on the planet now own more than three quarters of all the wealth.
And since the start of the pandemic, the world's ten richest men have doubled their fortunes on a smaller scale.
In our own communities, it can often feel like those with lots of money and those with less are living in completely different worlds.
Today, in the latest of our money 2.0 series, we talk with a sociologist about the mindset of the uber rich.
The lives of the richest people in the world are so different from those of the rest of us, it's almost literally unimaginable.
We'll also ask, what does inequality do to us?