America touts itself as an egalitarian society. But the way we reward people suggests that while everyone has an equal chance to get rich, only about five people can make more than a billion in a year. The way these five people get there reveals what our society most values -- the ability to help people with huge amounts of money get much richer as quickly and consistently as possible.

Wednesday's New York Times listed those five most valuable players. Here are our society's biggest winners, where they work, how much they made in 2007, and how they won:

• John Paulson (Paulson & Co.) -- 2007 earnings: $3.7 billion. Beginning in 2005, Paulson made huge bets on the decline in value of securities backed by subprime mortgages
• George Soros (Soros Fund Management) -- 2007 earnings: $2.9 billion. Soros' $17 billion flagship Quantum Endowment fund racked up a 31.7% return in 2007, its best annual showing since the high-tech implosion at the start of this decade. Soros' $2.9 billion payday comes almost entirely from his personal stake in the fund (which he no longer manages). I don't know how he made that 31.7% return.
• James Simons (Renaissance Technology) -- 2007 earnings: $2.8 billion. Simons, a mathematician and former Defense Department code breaker, uses complex computer models to trade.

The New York Times reports that the highest paid hedge fund manager, John Paulson, made $3.7 billion last year. If you are in the median family, that is 61,157 times more than your $60,500 income. Put another way, on a pretax basis Paulson made 30.6 times more in one hour -- $1.9 million -- than the median family took in all year. To make the list of the top 25 hedge fund managers you needed to earn $360 million last year. Thanks to them and a few others, income inequality in 2007 was at its most extreme since 1928, the year before the Great Depression began.

The top hedge fund managers made money in a variety of ways. They bet that prices of commodities like oil, wheat and copper would rise. But Paulson made his money by wagering enormous sums on a decline in the value of subprime mortgage-backed securities known as Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO). One of his funds making that bet returned 590% in 2007, and the other handed back 353%. By the end of 2007, Paulson managed $28 billion in assets, up more than four-fold from $6 billion in 2006.

Many of the trends from which these hedge funds profit are coming out of your pocket. The higher commodity prices are squeezing the budgets of people who are paying more for food and energy -- for example, producer price inflation rose 1.1% in March. And hedge funds are among those driving up the prices that you pay for commodities through their leveraged bets. But, as I posted earlier, Paulson profited from the pain of homeowners who defaulted on their mortgages and foreclosed on their homes.

The New York Times reports that in 2007, the median family made less -- $60,500 -- than it did in 2000 -- $61,000. Meanwhile, that family's costs have spiked -- oil is up 342%; wheat, milk, and egg prices have doubled or tripled. And the dollar has lost 65% of its purchasing power. But no worries -- hedge funds are making out well. DealBook reports that John Paulson, who famously profited from selling subprime short last year, made $3 billion in 2007. I don't know how much he made in 2000, but I'd bet that he's better off now than he was then.

Newsweek reports that people like Paulson are part of a new Superclass that's prospered in the last seven years. The Superclass is a group of a few thousand government and business people who control most of the world. How many and how much? Newsweek notes: "The top 50 control almost $50 trillion in assets. The heads of the world's biggest corporations are also members; the top 2,000 support perhaps 500 million people, generate almost $30 trillion in sales and have well over $100 trillion in assets."

Thanks to tax cuts passed in 2001, Paulson probably paid a lower tax rate on his $3 billion than the median American paid on his or her $60,500. Specifically, Paulson could have paid 15%, the long-term capital gains rate, on his income from shorting subprime. The median family paid a 25% rate on its income. That capital gains rate was 20% in 1997 so Paulson may have paid $150 million less in taxes thanks to that 15% rate. But the most interesting part is how Paulson profited.