Plutonomy
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The study of the production and distribution of wealth, or a society seen as dominated by such concerns. countable, derogatory, sometimes, uncountable
"On this side it [Socialism] is a crude compromise between the claims of labour and of capital — the hybrid child of Plutonomy and Communism."
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"On this side it [Socialism] is a crude compromise between the claims of labour and of capital — the hybrid child of Plutonomy and Communism."
Etymology
From pluto- + -nomy. Google’s n-gram search suggests the Plutonomy was coined in late 1800s. References to the term using n-gram can be found in books as early as 1851, in a book written by John Malcolm Forbes Ludlow titled “Christian Socialism and Its opponents”, where it was used in the context of wealth. In modern use popularized by Ajay Kapur in a series of papers published during his tenure as Citigroup’s global strategist.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.