On the evening news, Jean-Paul Bourdin hits the nail on the head: every billionaire is a social failure. A few own more than half of mankind - is the system broken? Is this injustice a fate?
Two strong heads from Silicon Valley, an old economist who survived May 68 and a bit of AI come up with the solution to return the added value of work to those who create it: all of us. But will capitalism and its heralds, led by billionaire Eldon Miller, stop them?
A thrilling, visionary novel, this third adventure of Gully Samoza explores the world's most vivid anomaly: inequality.
On the evening news, Jean-Paul Bourdin hits the nail on the head: every billionaire is a social failure. A few own more than half of mankind - is the system broken? Is this injustice a fate?
Two strong heads from Silicon Valley, an old economist who survived May 68 and a bit of AI come up with the solution to return the added value of work to those who create it: all of us. But will capitalism and its heralds, led by billionaire Eldon Miller, stop them?
A thrilling, visionary novel, this third adventure of Gully Samoza explores the world's most vivid anomaly: inequality.
“Will the accused please rise.”
The woman who had made the order had showed no emotion. The man seated to her right and the woman at her left, however, had shown a mix of compassion and disgust. They were on a crude stage in front of a red brick wall, where someone had crookedly pinned a flag bearing a raised fist and hammer, the only touch of ceremony. It was a filthy room without windows – probably a basement.
When the accused did not react, a man and a woman dressed all in black and wearing balaclavas grabbed him under the arms and lifted him up. He fell limp into a plastic chair, his hands tied behind his back. The woman pushed him to the ground and kicked him in the ribs – not hard, just enough to hurt him. And even more to humiliate him.
One of the women seated on the stage whispered into the chairwoman’s ear, saying that he had had enough. It was time to cut to the chase. The chairwoman rose and read from a handwritten sheet:
“The revolutionary tribunal finds you guilty of the charge of theft of common resources, as well as of the charges of pride, lust, greed, and vainglory.”
“Very good,” the other woman gestured to the chairwoman. The man seated with them nodded subtly. The chairwoman continued without reading from her sheet. “The revolutionary tribunal sentences you to death.”
Usually, a verdict like that triggers uproar from the public. This time, there was only a video camera on a tripod, a red light showing that it was filming the scene. Actually, it was streaming everything live.
The man and woman in black seized the condemned man. In his orange pajamas, he began to convulse with rage and fear. There were a few flashes of contempt, too, when, once or twice, his gaze crossed that of his judges. Though they looked unmoved, a few tics betrayed their nervousness. With a kick, the condemned man sent the chair he had been seated on during the trial flying. Then, however, it was his turn to be kicked, hard, in the stomach. The woman lifted him onto his knees, slid a stool towards him, and tried in vain to pass an orange canvas sack over his head. Then, she forced him onto the plastic seat. Twisting his neck, he grimaced pathetically in pain. The man in black had picked up a long pirate saber, with a beautiful double-rounding and chisel tip. To test that it would do the job, he threw up a sheet of paper into the air and sliced it cleanly in half with the blade. His head on the makeshift block, the condemned man was now crying, softly, although he did not sob. He vomited, softly, as well.
The woman seated at the right of the stage murmured that he had had it coming and gestured to the executioner to finish the job. Theatrically, he stood above his victim, spread his feet, and lifted the sword above his head with both hands.
And then he brought it down with all his strength.
A CEO earns 2,500 times the annual salary of an average employee? (That’s the same as saying that, in a year, for every $1 the employee earns, the CEO earns $2500.) Mind-boggling?
If we compared this to the proverbial hare-and-tortoise race, the tortoise would need 2,500 years to catch up (this is assuming the hare stood still after a year's sprint!). To gain perspective on this, if we limit the race to the retirement age of (say) 62 (a span of 40 years if they both started working at age 22), the CEO would have reached the $100,000 mark, leaving the poor employee light-years behind at a paltry $40 (working at the same 2500:1 ratio)!
To me, it came like a paralyzing blow to the head when I realized that, given an average life expectancy of 80, the employee doesn’t have the faintest chance of catching up, even if they tried.
This outrageous crime is what Jean-Cédric Michel’s The Robin Hood Formula is trying to call out to America: Were you aware of this insane income disparity? Many of us rarely stop to notice, yet that’s been happening (and continues) in the homeland you’re proud of! And now that you know it, what will you do?
In this novel, a group of friends from some of America’s Ivy League schools are furious when they discover the foregoing scenario that’s coolly draining the lifeblood of the working class. Armed with brilliance, determination, elite resources, hi-tech, and excellent teamwork, they come forward to fix it. When they’re ready, however, they realize that striking directly at the enemy would prove futile—the deeply entrenched nexus between dirt-rich corporations and the upper echelons of a superpower capitalist government would swiftly crush any remedial attempt. As a result, they devise a modern Robin Hood strategy to reclaim unfairly accumulated wealth held by corporations and redistribute it to the workforce that was cheated.
This book has an interesting storyline that traces a brilliant solution to the income disparity issue in the USA, which combines top economics research and the latest high-tech. You’ll find yourself traversing a backdrop comprising the corridors of schools like Stanford, opulent villas of billionaire CEOs, private planes for travel, luxury liners, and so on.
Besides the technology, the story is a thriller that combines some pulsing action, twists, intellectual clashes, and double-crossing a formidable CEO resulting in a nail-biting finish that follows the team's close call with the fury of the scorned CEO and their minions.
Quite understandably, some leisure and sex are in the background. However, it tends toward mild excessiveness, turning the reading sluggish as well as disturbing the focus. This aspect may also put off prudish/academic readers. Furthermore, the book’s brilliant solution, which ought to stand out prominently, slips a bit into the shadows, resulting in a negative impact overall.
The book’s cover works, but isn’t adequately expressive of its contents. While the readability is excellent, it isn’t unfortunately free from (sporadic) English-language errors.
Summing up the foregoing good and bad aspects, I award it 4 stars.
Being a thriller, it’s recommended for everyone except thriller-phobics, especially all innovative and curious minds with a background in economics and/or tech/STEM—native English speakers first, followed by the ESL community worldwide. To spell out the “special” category more clearly, it’s for economists, engineers, researchers, IT pros, thinkers, and others who passionately dream of a more equitable world in the future.