plutonomy
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
16
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
4
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
The study of the production and distribution of wealth, or a society seen as dominated by such concerns.
Countable; Derogatory; Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "On this side it [Socialism] is a crude compromise between the claims of labour and of capital — the hybrid child of Plutonomy and Communism."
- "The [Citigroup] analysts argued that the United States was evolving into a “plutonomy”—a top-heavy economic system where growth is driven primarily by a tiny, prosperous elite who consume an ever larger fraction of everything the economy produces."
- "Since his [Ajay Kapur's] very first paper in 2005—and he has kept publishing them, through a series of different employers—he has highlighted the fact that, in its essence, plutonomy is about inequality."
Etymology
From pluto- + -nomy. Google’s n-gram search suggests the Plutonomy was coined in late 1800s. References to the term using n-gram can be found in books as early as 1851, in a book written by John Malcolm Forbes Ludlow titled “Christian Socialism and Its opponents”, where it was used in the context of wealth. In modern use popularized by Ajay Kapur in a series of papers published during his tenure as Citigroup’s global strategist.