It's pretty much the premise of Undercover Boss. Except the serfs don't get to see how comparatively easy the King's job is. And they get in that little sops for proles moment where the magnificent benefactor makes a one-time gift to a single employee to correct the single instance of inequality exposed by the system so we all feel okay about our rising plutocracy. That's the dirty little secret of the Soviet Revolution: the Tsars weren't taken out by intellectuals, they were taken out by thugs who, on balance, didn't do an appreciably worse job than the royals. http://www.gq.com/story/amber-waves-of-green-jon-ronson-gq-july-2012I approached Wayne, as he's known, for wholly mathematical reasons. I'd worked out that there are six degrees of economic separation between a guy making ten bucks an hour and a Forbes billionaire, if you multiply each person's income by five. So I decided to journey across America to meet one representative of each multiple. By connecting these income brackets to actual people, I hoped to understand how money shapes their lives—and the life of the country—at a moment when the gap between rich and poor is such a combustible issue. Everyone in this story, then, makes roughly five times more than the last person makes. There's a dishwasher in Miami with an unbelievably stressful life, some nice middle-class Iowans with quite difficult lives, me with a perfectly fine if frequently anxiety-inducing life, a millionaire with an annoyingly happy life, a multimillionaire with a stunningly amazing life, and then, finally, at the summit, this great American eagle, Wayne, who tells me he's "pissed off" right now.