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I think the author is ascribing too much intent to a simple economy of shame that’s omnipresent in all classes; if people find out you have more than they do, t

by nyxxie 7y ago

I think the author is ascribing too much intent to a simple economy of shame that’s omnipresent in all classes; if people find out you have more than they do, they hate you. The author herself appears to be biased by this. She believes that the “rich elites” have a great burden of responsibility towards the world, which she justifies with shaky zero sum logic that suggests that because they have more, they necessarily took it from those who have less (her bulky villager metaphor). She might not be openly jealous, but she still seems to believe that her rich peers must somehow earn this wealth (an undefined and likely impossible undertaking), and writes about them with condescension when she sees they do not meet her burden. The kind of “rich elite” that attends Yale—that is to say a child who has access to vast sums of wealth they themselves did not amass—is an otherwise normal person who simply wants to live a happy life. Some end up president, some end up “gypsies”, but as the observes all of them have learned that in order to pursue these goals unmolested they have to put on the cloak of being less privileged than those around them. If they don’t, they’ll drown in a sea of hate from those of lesser means than them. Thats it. There’s no mystery here, just a bunch of kids trying to avoid being systematically bullied for circumstances outside of their control.

rossdavidh 7y ago
Well, by that logic, it should always have been this way. And yet, conspicuous consumption by the children of the ruling class, is not an historically unusual event. Pretending you're poor when you're very rich, while perhaps not unprecedented, is at least not the norm. So I think an explanation is called for, and hers is at the very least quite plausible. Whatever the reason, it would have to be something that is not common to all times and places, because the college-age children of the ruling class don't always act this way. One wonders if, for example, the equivalent demographic in China (a rising power) acts this way.
- nyxxie 7y ago
  >Pretending you're poor when you're very rich, while perhaps not unprecedented, is at least not the norm. So I think an explanation is called for, and hers is at the very least quite plausible Here's mine: social media and culture in general seeming to centralize around the internet places rich people in the same cultural environment as their poorer counterparts at a scale that is historically unprecedented. The elite have always been inaccessible, now they are within a stone's throw of us. American pop culture is disdainful (or at worst hostile) towards outwardly rich people, and has been legitimized by the popularity of the political concept of privilege. The rich want to participate in this culture but are surrounded by messaging telling them they're somehow lesser or a bad person for being rich. Cause, meet effect.
  - sagichmal 7y ago
    Yes, that's the superficial explanation. The interesting stuff, and the stuff of the essay, is when you peel back that layer with the first "why?"
- danenania 7y ago
  I think it’s still a form of status-signalling. It’s like how the ‘old money’ rich turn up their noses at the ‘new rich’ because they’re too gaudy and obvious in how they display wealth. Even if you can make more money than any of the old rich, you can never obtain the level of social capital and political power that being in the club gets you just by making tons of money—you need to be granted access by existing members who will carefully scrutinize your behavior and ideology before deciding you’re one of them. But that doesn’t mean that the old money folks aren’t showing off their wealth and power—they just do so in coded ways. What the article describes is basically the same thing.
- Jill_the_Pill 7y ago
  Yalies have been "rich enough to play poor" at least since the 90s. I remember seeing the son of a prominent senator at a picnic with a hole in the sleeve of his old (but probably expensive) sweater and a local friend commenting that those Yalies always want to look poor.
Dylan16807 7y ago
> She believes that the “rich elites” have a great burden of responsibility towards the world, which she justifies with shaky zero sum logic that suggests that because they have more, they necessarily took it from those who have less (her bulky villager metaphor). A single person can only be so productive on a consistent basis. There's a threshold of wealth where you can say that on average 90% of the money is coming from the labors of other people. Labor and trade are not zero sum. The decision of where the generated dollars go is zero sum. > She might not be openly jealous, but she still seems to believe that her rich peers must somehow earn this wealth (an undefined and likely impossible undertaking), and writes about them with condescension when she sees they do not meet her burden. Do you mean they can't 'earn' it in her eyes, or are you agreeing that a certain amount of wealth cannot actually be earned? Ideally nobody would condescend here, and taxes would have taken care of things right from the start. But taxes in the US are a lot less progressive than they used to be, so they come nowhere near taking care of that burden on their own. (Well, ideally ideally social services could be funded well without taxes at all, but that's not a real-world outlook. And income inequality would be fixed too.)
- nyxxie 7y ago
  > Labor and trade are not zero sum. The decision of where the generated dollars go is zero sum. Certainly, my point was that possessing a greater share of wealth is not the same as the completely unearned disparity in distribution of common resources in the author's hypothetical scenario. We live in a world of scarcity, so disparity when that scarcity is left up to market forces is to be expected and in fact could even be argued to be earned. This is completely different than this sort of village commune that the author envisions. Nevertheless, the author equates the two to justify her argument, which I believe is fallacious. > Do you mean they can't 'earn' it in their eyes, or are you agreeing that a certain amount of wealth cannot actually be earned? The former. This responsibility that the author posits her rich peers have is based on nothing other than her feeling that they didn't earn their position and aren't even using it properly, which will only go away after said peers do something that alleviates this feeling. What is that thing? Only the author knows. Maybe she doesn't even know, she just knows that she wants the rich people to fix it. > they come nowhere near taking care of that burden on their own. I don't believe it's fair that they even be under some sort of implied burden. Unless they are criminals, their family earned that wealth playing the same game as everyone else and have chosen to use it to ensure their offspring are comfortable. I see no problem in that.
joe_the_user 7y ago
I went to college in the Bay Area and to a small private college with significant portion of very wealthy. Some in the private college concealed their wealth, some didn't. The thing is, most middle or above folks with an once of sophistication can sense the trust fund kid a mile away - most working class can sense something too, just maybe don't know the middle-class from the trust funders. I'm shocked the author was shocked to discover someone, at Yale, who spent their time in self-absorbed, non-survival-oriented activity was very wealthy. I guess some at the Ivy League spend their time learning to act wealthy without realizing that's what they're doing (I think the 2% of actually poor who get into the Ivy Leagues tend to be "hard working rules followers", who by this tend to not notice the obvious about people). But given the real wealthy folks signal who they are, whether they like it or not, all day long, the situation makes your point about "they have to conceal it to be treated as human" ring totally false. Nah, they can't conceal it, not to very many, and most know it. I've met some who didn't know but they were sad and I assume there are others who go in for much deeper cover but that's a small minority.
- nyxxie 7y ago
  > the situation makes your point about "they have to conceal it to be treated as human" ring totally false They can smell it sure, but their reaction is proportional to some product of distance between their socioeconomic positions and how much shame the other party signals. Pretending to be poor is demonstrating shame of one's higher position. In your case, this seems to have been enough to placate their less privileged peers.
  - joe_the_user 7y ago
    But it really occurs to me, the rich aren't acting poor to fool the poor. The rich don't care about the poor and don't encounter them that much. The rich act "poor" to fool themselves or just flatter themselves, to tell themselves they face challenges or just because their idea of the poor is romantic. Back in college X, lots of folks dressed vaguely dock workers, with lots of plaid and such, but no one trying to actually seem a dock worker. It was just a starting off point for a pose. No, the rich are ashamed but aren't ashamed to you, they're ashamed to themselves.
ThrowawayR2 7y ago
> She believes that the “rich elites” have a great burden of responsibility towards the world, which she justifies with shaky zero sum logic... "Noblesse oblige"? "With great power comes great responsibility"†? "To whom much has been given, much is expected"? The belief that the wealthy and powerful have a duty to use that power to improve the welfare of the society in which they live has been around for a long, long time. Characterizing it as "jealousy" is unfounded. † A phrase that I today learned existed long before Stan Lee's popularization of it; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_great_power_comes_great_responsibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_great_power_comes_great_r...
- mpweiher 7y ago
  > "Noblesse oblige"? "With great power comes great responsibility"†? "To whom much has been given, much is expected"? "Eigentum verpflichtet. Sein Gebrauch soll zugleich dem Wohle der Allgemeinheit dienen." That's article 14 paragraph 2 of the German Grundgesetz (Basic Law ~ Constitution). Translated: "Property entails obligations. Its use shall also serve the public good."
- BaronSamedi 7y ago
  The point that struck me was the assertion that American elites have become dysfunctional. And, that wokeness is more of a symptom rather than cause of that dysfunction. That is a very interesting idea and worthy of consideration. Historically, crises among elites are dangerous. Elites losing the confidence of the people, for example, is destabilizing. Severe conflict among elite factions (sometimes during a loss of confidence period, sometimes not) can also produce instability or worse.
  - photojosh 7y ago
    Perhaps you'd be interested in Peter Turchin's theory of "overpopulation of elites" being a root cause of societal dysfunction. http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/intra-elite-competition-a-key-concept-for-understanding-the-dynamics-of-complex-societies/ http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/intra-elite-competition...
shkkmo 7y ago
> as he[sic] observes all of them have learned that in order to pursue these goals unmolested they have to put on the cloak of being less privileged than those around them. This isn't really the issue. The issue is not that they are pretending, it is that they are forgetting that they are pretending. > We forget the extent of our own power and start blaming an ephemeral elite beyond ourselves for the ills of society.
silvestrov 7y ago
> a bunch of kids trying to avoid being systematically bullied The author thinks the Elite Universities are the center of the world and defines what happends everywhere else. They aren't and they don't. There isn't anything anymore which is "the center of everything". If this was only about rich people at Yale, Harvard, etc, then it would be a storm in a glass of water. It would have no consequence in most universities. But we see the dysfunction at many universities in the western world. A good explanation would explain why this also happends in many other places.
- dageshi 7y ago
  She did explain that I think? What happens at Yale sets an example which influences what happens at other universities not just in the US but around the world because Yale has always been the university which educates much of America's ruling class.
chongli 7y ago
If you only look at wealth as a bunch of numbers on account statements, then yes, it's pretty unfair to feel responsibility thrust upon you for having a bigger number. But that's an abstraction and a distraction from the truth of the matter: wealth is capital. It's access to means and it's ownership of resources and property and everything else. It's one thing to be bullied because you drive an expensive car (as a teenager) and take luxury vacations to private islands. It's another thing entirely to be heir to a huge corporation, let alone a petro-state like Saudi Arabia. With the twin spectres of climate change and trade war (escalating into armed conflict), there is a hell of a lot of responsibility placed upon the elite. Frankly, I'm not shocked at all that people are overwhelmed enough to abdicate. The question is who will step and take charge? The current crop of candidates do not inspire confidence.

by nyxxie 7y ago

rossdavidh 7y ago

Well, by that logic, it should always have been this way. And yet, conspicuous consumption by the children of the ruling class, is not an historically unusual event. Pretending you're poor when you're very rich, while perhaps not unprecedented, is at least not the norm. So I think an explanation is called for, and hers is at the very least quite plausible. Whatever the reason, it would have to be something that is not common to all times and places, because the college-age children of the ruling class don't always act this way. One wonders if, for example, the equivalent demographic in China (a rising power) acts this way.

nyxxie 7y ago
>Pretending you're poor when you're very rich, while perhaps not unprecedented, is at least not the norm. So I think an explanation is called for, and hers is at the very least quite plausible Here's mine: social media and culture in general seeming to centralize around the internet places rich people in the same cultural environment as their poorer counterparts at a scale that is historically unprecedented. The elite have always been inaccessible, now they are within a stone's throw of us. American pop culture is disdainful (or at worst hostile) towards outwardly rich people, and has been legitimized by the popularity of the political concept of privilege. The rich want to participate in this culture but are surrounded by messaging telling them they're somehow lesser or a bad person for being rich. Cause, meet effect.
- sagichmal 7y ago
  Yes, that's the superficial explanation. The interesting stuff, and the stuff of the essay, is when you peel back that layer with the first "why?"
danenania 7y ago
I think it’s still a form of status-signalling. It’s like how the ‘old money’ rich turn up their noses at the ‘new rich’ because they’re too gaudy and obvious in how they display wealth. Even if you can make more money than any of the old rich, you can never obtain the level of social capital and political power that being in the club gets you just by making tons of money—you need to be granted access by existing members who will carefully scrutinize your behavior and ideology before deciding you’re one of them. But that doesn’t mean that the old money folks aren’t showing off their wealth and power—they just do so in coded ways. What the article describes is basically the same thing.
Jill_the_Pill 7y ago
Yalies have been "rich enough to play poor" at least since the 90s. I remember seeing the son of a prominent senator at a picnic with a hole in the sleeve of his old (but probably expensive) sweater and a local friend commenting that those Yalies always want to look poor.

Dylan16807 7y ago

> She believes that the “rich elites” have a great burden of responsibility towards the world, which she justifies with shaky zero sum logic that suggests that because they have more, they necessarily took it from those who have less (her bulky villager metaphor). A single person can only be so productive on a consistent basis. There's a threshold of wealth where you can say that on average 90% of the money is coming from the labors of other people. Labor and trade are not zero sum. The decision of where the generated dollars go is zero sum. > She might not be openly jealous, but she still seems to believe that her rich peers must somehow earn this wealth (an undefined and likely impossible undertaking), and writes about them with condescension when she sees they do not meet her burden. Do you mean they can't 'earn' it in her eyes, or are you agreeing that a certain amount of wealth cannot actually be earned? Ideally nobody would condescend here, and taxes would have taken care of things right from the start. But taxes in the US are a lot less progressive than they used to be, so they come nowhere near taking care of that burden on their own. (Well, ideally ideally social services could be funded well without taxes at all, but that's not a real-world outlook. And income inequality would be fixed too.)

nyxxie 7y ago
> Labor and trade are not zero sum. The decision of where the generated dollars go is zero sum. Certainly, my point was that possessing a greater share of wealth is not the same as the completely unearned disparity in distribution of common resources in the author's hypothetical scenario. We live in a world of scarcity, so disparity when that scarcity is left up to market forces is to be expected and in fact could even be argued to be earned. This is completely different than this sort of village commune that the author envisions. Nevertheless, the author equates the two to justify her argument, which I believe is fallacious. > Do you mean they can't 'earn' it in their eyes, or are you agreeing that a certain amount of wealth cannot actually be earned? The former. This responsibility that the author posits her rich peers have is based on nothing other than her feeling that they didn't earn their position and aren't even using it properly, which will only go away after said peers do something that alleviates this feeling. What is that thing? Only the author knows. Maybe she doesn't even know, she just knows that she wants the rich people to fix it. > they come nowhere near taking care of that burden on their own. I don't believe it's fair that they even be under some sort of implied burden. Unless they are criminals, their family earned that wealth playing the same game as everyone else and have chosen to use it to ensure their offspring are comfortable. I see no problem in that.

joe_the_user 7y ago

I went to college in the Bay Area and to a small private college with significant portion of very wealthy. Some in the private college concealed their wealth, some didn't. The thing is, most middle or above folks with an once of sophistication can sense the trust fund kid a mile away - most working class can sense something too, just maybe don't know the middle-class from the trust funders. I'm shocked the author was shocked to discover someone, at Yale, who spent their time in self-absorbed, non-survival-oriented activity was very wealthy. I guess some at the Ivy League spend their time learning to act wealthy without realizing that's what they're doing (I think the 2% of actually poor who get into the Ivy Leagues tend to be "hard working rules followers", who by this tend to not notice the obvious about people). But given the real wealthy folks signal who they are, whether they like it or not, all day long, the situation makes your point about "they have to conceal it to be treated as human" ring totally false. Nah, they can't conceal it, not to very many, and most know it. I've met some who didn't know but they were sad and I assume there are others who go in for much deeper cover but that's a small minority.

nyxxie 7y ago
> the situation makes your point about "they have to conceal it to be treated as human" ring totally false They can smell it sure, but their reaction is proportional to some product of distance between their socioeconomic positions and how much shame the other party signals. Pretending to be poor is demonstrating shame of one's higher position. In your case, this seems to have been enough to placate their less privileged peers.
- joe_the_user 7y ago
  But it really occurs to me, the rich aren't acting poor to fool the poor. The rich don't care about the poor and don't encounter them that much. The rich act "poor" to fool themselves or just flatter themselves, to tell themselves they face challenges or just because their idea of the poor is romantic. Back in college X, lots of folks dressed vaguely dock workers, with lots of plaid and such, but no one trying to actually seem a dock worker. It was just a starting off point for a pose. No, the rich are ashamed but aren't ashamed to you, they're ashamed to themselves.

ThrowawayR2 7y ago

> She believes that the “rich elites” have a great burden of responsibility towards the world, which she justifies with shaky zero sum logic... "Noblesse oblige"? "With great power comes great responsibility"†? "To whom much has been given, much is expected"? The belief that the wealthy and powerful have a duty to use that power to improve the welfare of the society in which they live has been around for a long, long time. Characterizing it as "jealousy" is unfounded. † A phrase that I today learned existed long before Stan Lee's popularization of it; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_great_power_comes_great_responsibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_great_power_comes_great_r...

mpweiher 7y ago
> "Noblesse oblige"? "With great power comes great responsibility"†? "To whom much has been given, much is expected"? "Eigentum verpflichtet. Sein Gebrauch soll zugleich dem Wohle der Allgemeinheit dienen." That's article 14 paragraph 2 of the German Grundgesetz (Basic Law ~ Constitution). Translated: "Property entails obligations. Its use shall also serve the public good."
BaronSamedi 7y ago
The point that struck me was the assertion that American elites have become dysfunctional. And, that wokeness is more of a symptom rather than cause of that dysfunction. That is a very interesting idea and worthy of consideration. Historically, crises among elites are dangerous. Elites losing the confidence of the people, for example, is destabilizing. Severe conflict among elite factions (sometimes during a loss of confidence period, sometimes not) can also produce instability or worse.
- photojosh 7y ago
  Perhaps you'd be interested in Peter Turchin's theory of "overpopulation of elites" being a root cause of societal dysfunction. http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/intra-elite-competition-a-key-concept-for-understanding-the-dynamics-of-complex-societies/ http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/intra-elite-competition...

shkkmo 7y ago

> as he[sic] observes all of them have learned that in order to pursue these goals unmolested they have to put on the cloak of being less privileged than those around them. This isn't really the issue. The issue is not that they are pretending, it is that they are forgetting that they are pretending. > We forget the extent of our own power and start blaming an ephemeral elite beyond ourselves for the ills of society.

silvestrov 7y ago

> a bunch of kids trying to avoid being systematically bullied The author thinks the Elite Universities are the center of the world and defines what happends everywhere else. They aren't and they don't. There isn't anything anymore which is "the center of everything". If this was only about rich people at Yale, Harvard, etc, then it would be a storm in a glass of water. It would have no consequence in most universities. But we see the dysfunction at many universities in the western world. A good explanation would explain why this also happends in many other places.

dageshi 7y ago
She did explain that I think? What happens at Yale sets an example which influences what happens at other universities not just in the US but around the world because Yale has always been the university which educates much of America's ruling class.

chongli 7y ago

If you only look at wealth as a bunch of numbers on account statements, then yes, it's pretty unfair to feel responsibility thrust upon you for having a bigger number. But that's an abstraction and a distraction from the truth of the matter: wealth is capital. It's access to means and it's ownership of resources and property and everything else. It's one thing to be bullied because you drive an expensive car (as a teenager) and take luxury vacations to private islands. It's another thing entirely to be heir to a huge corporation, let alone a petro-state like Saudi Arabia. With the twin spectres of climate change and trade war (escalating into armed conflict), there is a hell of a lot of responsibility placed upon the elite. Frankly, I'm not shocked at all that people are overwhelmed enough to abdicate. The question is who will step and take charge? The current crop of candidates do not inspire confidence.