NEW YORK — On a bitter evening in mid-January, a group of bankers and book publishers gathered on the 42nd floor of Goldman Sachs’s global headquarters here. The setting could not have been more New York — skyscrapers twinkled out the windows to the north and a jazz ensemble played softly in the corner. But the appetizers, reflecting the theme of the event, were an international mishmash: thumb-sized potato pancakes with sour cream and caviar, steaming Chinese dumplings, Indian samosas and Turkish kebabs.
The party was in honor of the Goldman thinker who had served notice to the Western investment community a decade ago that the world was being transformed by the rise of emerging markets, in particular, the four behemoths that Jim O’Neill, then chief economist at Goldman Sachs, dubbed the BRICs: Brazil, Russia, India and China.
In a new book that Mr. O’Neill has published, “The Growth Map: Economic Opportunity in the BRICs and Beyond,” he argued that the BRIC concept had “become the dominant story of our generation” and described the next 11 emerging markets that are joining the BRICs.
But there is another force that is reshaping the global economy today, and the Goldman executives who toasted Mr. O’Neill are a reflection of that: the rise, in the developed Western economies, of the “1 percent” and the creation of what many are calling a new gilded age.