Word.ws English Dictionary

plutonomy

plutonomy noun: the study of the production and distribution of wealth, or a society seen as dominated by such concerns.

Noun

plutonomy (countable and uncountable, plural plutonomies)

  1. (derogatory, sometimes) The study of the production and distribution of wealth, or a society seen as dominated by such concerns.
    • On this side it [Socialism] is a crude compromise between the claims of labour and of capital — the hybrid child of Plutonomy and Communism.1866, Frederic Harrison, “Industrial Co-operation”, in The Fortnightly Review, volume III, page 499
    • The [Citigroup] analysts argued that the United States was evolving into a “plutonomy”—a top-heavy economic system where growth is driven primarily by a tiny, prosperous elite who consume an ever larger fraction of everything the economy produces.2015, Martin Ford, The Rise of the Robots, Oneworld, →ISBN, page 198

Forms of plutonomy

pluralplutonomies

Origin of plutonomy

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.

Words formed from plutonomy

Questions about plutonomy

What does plutonomy mean?
Plutonomy means the study of the production and distribution of wealth, or a society seen as dominated by such concerns.
What part of speech is plutonomy?
Plutonomy is a noun.
What is the plural of plutonomy?
The plural of plutonomy is plutonomies.

Words near plutonomy in the dictionary

  1. plutonomic
  2. plutonomics
  3. plutonomies
  4. plutonomist
  5. plutonomists
  6. plutonomy
  7. plutonous
  8. plutons
  9. plutonyl
  10. plutophile
  11. plutophiles

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: plutonomy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “plutonomy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/plutonomy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.