Forbes’ list of the 400 wealthiest Americans—the Forbes Four Hundred—was published last week and there are two important points of note:

1.When the first Forbes Four Hundred was published in 1982 the benchmark for entry was a net worth of $200 million. This year, for the first time, the benchmark is $1 billion dollars. In 1982 there were 42 billionaires. This year there are 400.

2. As you’d expect Bill Gates ($53 billion) and Warren Buffett ($46 billion) are in first and second places on the list. But casino owner Sheldon Adelson is the new number three having jumped from a net worth of $3 billion in 2004 to a net worth of $23.6 billion today. Just to set that in context Adelson’s wealth has increased by $23.6 million per day over the past two years, just under $1 million an hour.

As some of you know, I’ve spent most of this year as part of a team of writers and editors working on a book about the Forbes Four Hundred. The book will be published by Knopf in fall of 2007 to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the list.

The book will have plenty of facts and figures in it. But it will also have lots of fascinating stories about how America’s wealthiest people make—and spend—their money.

Working on the book may have warped my sense of value (when you’re thinking in hundreds of millions and billions of dollars, $10 million suddenly seems very small). But it has also been an inspiration to see how these people, many born into inauspicious circumstances, went on to become some of the most successful people in the country.

Sheldon Adelson was the son of a Boston taxi driver who started out in business selling sample-size shaving cream and shampoo (which he got free from factories) to motels. He made his first fortune with the computer trade show COMDEX in Las Vegas. But he became a billionaire when he moved into the casino industry. He owns the Venetian in Las Vegas, the Sands Macao in China and is currently building a $6 billion complex in China and a $3.5 billion complex in Singapore.

Not bad for a poor boy from Boston.

George Galloway interviewing Tony Benn.

Of course, there was the rather inescapable fact that Protestantism embodied dissent, authorized dissent, was dissent: the Queen was swimming against a tide of her own creation. The tide began with religion, but it lapped at farther shores.

Later Protestant triumphalists would credit the Reformation with everything from capitalism to public education to democaracy; they exaggerated but they had a point. Protestant preachers urged both men and women to become literate so they could read the Bible, and literacy blossomed in Elizabeth’s reign. People who read the Bible could read other things, too; and, what was more dangerous, write things. “Every gross brained idiot is suffered to come into print,” fumed an English scholar. The Queen and her Council were less concerned about the idiots than about the pamphleteers, the propagandists, the crititics: this was something new.

Her Majesty’s Spymaster, Stephen Budiansky.

Via (Complete Tosh)

Is this funeral home as funny in US English as it is in British English?