Review of Mastering the Universe: The Obscene Wealth of the Ruling Class, What They do with Their Money and Why You Should Hate Them Even More by Rob Larson (Haymarket, 2024). 

In Rob Larson’s new book Mastering the Universe–an attack on wealth inequality in the US and globally–the author twice resorts to the phrase “ball fondling” to describe the sycophantic treatment billionaires typically receive in our society. While such profane vocabulary is relatively rare in his writings–although he does use “fucking” as an adjective or adverb several times in Mastering the Universe–it is also suggestive of a broader charm he brings to his intellectual output. In his career as a book author and writer for such publications as Dollars & Sense and Current Affairs, it is clear that he has endeavored to make himself relatable to ordinary people. His articulation of economic concepts and explanation of current events is made in a pleasingly simple, clear and frequently light hearted fashion. There is a beauty in his clear and unpretentious prose. His writing skill is all the more remarkable in light of him being an economics professor (at Tacoma Community College in Washington state). Not many professional economists are engaging writers.

Besides his writing gifts, Larson has another standout quality apparent in the book presently under review as well as in his other works. Like his mentor Noam Chomsky (to whom Mastering the Universe is dedicated), Larson is clearly an assiduous reader of mainstream news publications, particularly the business press. In Mastering the Universe, he weaves useful tidbits he picked up from the mainstream media with analysis from academic economists to produce a compelling narrative. 

The basic argument of Mastering the Universe is one very familiar to left wing audiences: in recent decades, neoliberal government policies have led to a much greater concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands.  We live in a new Gilded Age: billionaire wealth has surged into the stratosphere while life for a significant majority of the American population is increasingly financially precarious. The dynamic was described in a leaked 2005 Citibank memo which Larson quotes at the outset of his book. The memo said that the United States was not merely a plutocracy but a ”plutonomy”: wealth is so concentrated in the top 1 percent of wealth earners that the latter are the primary drivers of economic growth. Much of the country’s spending power is hogged by the uber wealthy and so big business often places less priority on catering to the spending preferences of a large majority of the population.

Larson’s book adopts a particular angle in criticizing the concentration of wealth in the 1%. He argues that this wealth is spent wastefully, is not particularly “earned”–much of it is inherited–and that it is largely accumulated not in direct engagement with the productive economy but in passive income from assets (stock dividends, property rents, etc).  Many pages of the book are spent cataloging how the rich spend their money on million dollar watches, superyachts, private jets and multiple condos that sit empty (while the homeless population surges on the streets outside). He lays particular emphasis on the environmentally destructive consumption of the 1%, for example their use of private jets. 

Larson also makes the crucial point that the most dynamic sectors of the economy today–and the foundation of the astronomical fortunes of the uber wealthy which control them–were created through public funding. For example, the internet was developed in significant part through investments by DARPA, the Pentagon’s research agency. He points to this dynamic as underlying one of the latest wasteful spending fads of oligarchs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos: space tourism. Decades of NASA’s taxpayer funded R&D in outer space travel laid the  foundation for Bezos’s space tourism company Blue Origin. 

Revolutionary Socialism: The Cure for Wealth Stratification 

Larson argues that progressive social movements that successfully brought pressure on governments in the United States and Europe in the mid-20th century to engage in wealth redistribution and protection of labor unions made a crucial mistake. While such movements were able to visibly reduce economic inequality in their respective societies–and increase taxes and regulations on corporations–the productive forces of the economy remained controlled by private capitalists. Beginning in the 1970’s, those capitalists in the United States and Europe utilized their wealth to launch a counterattack against the welfare state and the power of labor unions. Larson believes that progressive movements must make central to their agenda a demand to completely expropriate the means of production from private ownership. Businesses should be taken out of the hands of owners and managers and placed under the democratic control of the group that actually produces society’s wealth: the workers. This is the true meaning of socialism. 

As to how society might secure the complete expropriation of the means of production, radical left readers will be well familiar with Larson’s exhortations for ordinary people to form mass movements. It is understandable that Larson offers cliches on this point; there is no magic formula for securing radical economic and social change; by far the most realistic method to do so is patient organization of social movements and mass struggle over a long course of time. Regarding current mass movements, Larson offers a useful summary of recent worker organizing efforts at Amazon and Starbucks. 

Larson offers no description of the nuts and bolts of the operations of a potential post-capitalist society where workplaces are democratically controlled. It is likely that he believes that such structures would have to be worked out through trial and error according to the specific circumstances and needs of particular regions and locales. In any case, Larson’s book makes an effective case that economic exploitation under capitalism has derailed the achievement of full human freedom for far too long. 

---