‘The Hidden Globe’ and the Attack on Universities

The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

Published in October 2024

One way to understand our national erosion of inclusion, replaced by an ascendant strain of intolerance, is as a reaction to growing inequality. The right has weaponized legitimate fears about economic insecurity. The result has been simultaneous attacks on civil society institutions, including the civil service, the press and universities.

If this hypothesis is correct—that economic inequality underlies and fuels the current populist moment driving the distrust and attacks on higher education—then those of us within academia may want to pay more attention to the roots of that inequality.

Journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s recent book, The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, provides one piece to understanding the roots and enablers of wealth concentration and structural inequality. The book takes the reader inside some of the physical places that hide and shelter global wealth.

These places include free ports and free zones, geographies in which tax policies and regulatory regimes cater to the 1 percent. Tax havens and freedom from regulatory scrutiny can be carved out of sovereign nations, such as Switzerland’s Geneva Freeport and Singapore’s Le Freeport. Countries such as the UAE, the British Virgin Islands and Luxembourg compete to offer the least regulatory oversight and the lowest tax rates.

In this current environment, when political theater threatens the public funding of basic research, where and how the rich hide their assets may seem of little concern. What books like The Hidden Globe enable, however, is a glimpse into the global infrastructure of wealth accumulation and concentration.

While sometimes challenging to see, there is a direct relationship between tax avoidance among the wealthy and public disinvestment. Wealth shielded from legitimate taxation translates into dollars not available for public investments, such as education, health care and research, that benefit all members of society.

The Hidden Globe illuminates all the ways the global economy is rigged to favor the few. Seeing these unseen places where wealth gets laundered is one step in creating rules, structures and institutions designed to benefit the public good.

While The Hidden Globe is the work of a journalist, I’d love to see more research on the mechanisms of wealth concentration come out of higher education. In comparison to the academic research on poverty, there is far too little critical analysis and theorizing on the workings of wealth. There is still less thinking about the relationship between inequality, wealth concentration and the future of higher education.

What books from social scientists do you recommend about the wealthy and the world they are creating?

Can you point us to any thinkers working to connect the machinery of wealth concentration with the political economy of postsecondary education?

What are you reading?