6 ms·

Ok Billionaire: Why Do the Opinions of 600 Americans Get So Much Airtime? (2019)

66 points by robtherobber 11mo ago

camillomiller 11mo ago
Because America values money above everything else. Ask anyone outside America, and that is immediately clear to them. Yet Americans are so imbued with the normalization of transactionality in all aspects of life that they can't really understand why it's not ok that the pursuit of happiness has become simply the pursuit of riches. Want another example? Look at how y'all consider poverty as basically a personal bad choice.
- 0_____0 11mo ago
  The AI boosters are sort of telling. Their bull case is that AGI/robotics could replace 100% of global GDP, which doesn't seem to register as a weird thing to want. Replace all labor on the planet and I'll be stinking rich!! That's an insane thing to want, regardless of whether it's even possible.
  - ElevenLathe 11mo ago
    IMO it's a reasonable thing to want /alongside a massive and historic global reform package that redistributes the massive windfall it represents/. Wanting to replace all human labor under our current political economy is just a thinly-veiled wish for mass suffering, chaos, and death.
    - camillomiller 11mo ago
      The second part of your first sentence is like a full-on universe that they haven't even started to consider, which invalidates the first part completely.
- 9rx 11mo ago
  But actually, it's because people have a limit on how many other people they can keep track of. Robin Dunbar, of Dunbar's number fame, suggested the limits were around 500 people as acquaintances and around 1,500 people whom you could recognize. Beyond that, other people may as well not exist. When communication at a distance was hard and the world was more insular, the faces you'd recognize would be mostly of people in your community. Still, even within a community, you were going to take more interest in the local movers and shakers over the hobo on the street. Our modern, interconnected global village just scales that up. We still focus on the movers and shakers and ignore the hobos just the same. But now, instead of everyone in a community recognizing the same 600 locals, everyone in the world now recognizes the same 600 people. Which is also how they become so rich. Need to buy a widget? You're not going to seek out a hobo to see if he has any in his beat up old shopping cart, are you? (well most won't, anyway) You're going to go to straight to the guy you already know. When communities were insular that meant some small number of people in the community were richer than the rest, but there was a pretty hard limit on how rich they could become when there were only so many local buyers. The difference now is, again, a matter of scale. When the entire world wants to buy from the same person, that hard limit becomes multiplied by a very large multiplier.
- sharts 11mo ago
  In America it seems the pursuit of happiness requires pursuit of riches. Just the fact that there is very little social safety net, people can go homeless due to medical bills, and the whole pull yourself up from your own bootstraps (because socialism and bailouts are only reserved for the wealthy and connected) —it seems obvious that valuing money becomes the main concern. Without the money you can’t really live let along thrive or be happy without constant anxiety.
api 11mo ago
Isn’t that obvious? Money buys things including attention.
- blenderob 11mo ago
  It's not that all obvious to me. Where I live the richest don't get this kind of attention very much. People know they're the richest and all that but you don't see their opinions broadcasted on every social media and news outlet. On the contrary, they're mostly out of sight, out of mind!
  - idiotsecant 11mo ago
    Because they aren't buying newspapers. American rich people don't all have the common sense to just be rich and enjoy their opulent life discretely, they need to also insert themselves into the national dialogue.
  - AnimalMuppet 11mo ago
    The US has never had a situation where the rule of law collapsed, and mobs were actively trying to kill the elite. ("Elite" here meaning those with extreme amounts of money or social status.) In places like Europe, they remember things like that. So if you're an elite there, you don't make waves or have a high profile, because you know from history that doing so can attract attention of a kind that you really don't want. But in the US, that's not in your history. So, especially if you're rather narcissistic, you think of using your wealth to get attention.
beeflet 11mo ago
Seems like overly long copium about nothing in particular. The author makes some assertions, like that elizabeth warren is a viable candidate or that the republican party will weaken in coming years due to demographic changes, or that shale gas is a bubble. But the way in which it is written reveals an insecurity that this may not be the case. The author expresses frustration that the new york times has a variety of perspectives. >It often seems as though the Democratic and Republican parties are unconsciously perceived as the wife and husband in a very, very traditional marriage, since the former is supposed to defer to and please the latter, and the latter is free to run roughshod over the former I think the author may be a bit trapped by their habit of seeing everything along gender lines
keiferski 11mo ago
I think there has actually been something of a cultural shift on this topic in the last ±decade or so. The word billionaire used to have more baked-in positive cultural energy, something laudable in-itself. Nowadays though it feels like the label has a negative tinge; not quite a bad thing, but not something that feels like a universal benefit either. This change probably tracks with the rise of populism.
- Tarsul 11mo ago
  It's weird to me as a German because growing up in the 90s exorbitant wealth was not seen as inherently good, if i had to guesstimate the general feeling - it was generally seen as inherently a-little-bit-worse-than-neutral (the saying "Reichtum stinkt" - meaning rich people stink, was quite common). However, and probably due to way too much cultural influence of US media (and tech) this general feeling changed a little bit more to the positive side (00s/2010s). But now that everything goes to shit, the feeling shifts again to more negative. At least that's my nonscientific interpretation of the historical feeling in Germany since the 90s. But would love studies about it, in general.
  - jack_tripper 11mo ago
    >as a German because growing up in the 90s exorbitant wealth was not seen as inherently good That perception didn't prevent anyone in Germany from amassing obscene wealth, often due to their political connections during and post WW2. They're just very discreet and hidden and don't flaunt it publicly. What's needed to prevent wealth inequality is laws and enforcement, not relying on the perception of the masses since billionaires don't care what people think about them.
  - jaapz 11mo ago
    > Reichtum stinkt Funny, in Dutch we have "Rijke stinkerd" which means basically "stinking rich person".
  - aleph_minus_one 11mo ago
    Relevant concerning this topic: From 1993 to 2000 (with some attempts of later revivals) there was a TV game show in some German commercial television channel (RTL) named "Die 100.000 Mark Show" ("The 100.000 Mark Show" - (100.000 mark is a little bit more than 50.000 Euro using the conversion factor of 1.95583)) where the winners could win 100.00 mark. > https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_100.000_Mark_Show https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_100.000_Mark_Show This was the first game show in German TV that offered such a huge amount of prize money and was initially criticized for this. In 1999, in Germany "Wer wird Millionär" (basically the German version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?") - initially with 1 million mark (2002 it was even changed to EUR 1 million) - started. > https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wer_wird_Million%C3%A4r%3F https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wer_wird_Million%C3%A4r%3F I can also remember that at this time the show was criticized for this large possible prize money, but got more accepted over time, in particular because the host of this show (Günther Jauch) was very popular (he was basically the reason why "Wer wird Millionär" was very popular in Germany, but many other similar quiz shows were not). In 2000 another TV channel (Sat.1) made a heavily marketed experiment with "Die Chance deines Lebens" (The chance of your life) > https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Chance_deines_Lebens https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Chance_deines_Lebens where you could even win up to 10 million mark. While this was again criticized by the media, the show was a failure because it was too slow-paced, and nobody won the 10.000.000 mark in any of the broadcasted episodes (which would have caused media headlines and thus popularity). On the other hand, from 2006 to 2015, there was a game show "Schlag den Raab" (Beat the Raab) > https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlag_den_Raab https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlag_den_Raab where you had to win against the (at that time very popular, but incredibly narcissistic) TV host Stefan Raab in a lot of games. There were also variants of this TV show in other countries, but only in the German version the winning sum was very large (at least EUR 500.000, with the money going into a jackpot if Stefan Raab won in the episode, so (see Wikipedia article) winning sums up to EUR 3.5 million were achieved). Basically the fact that the winning sum was very large (in opposite to the versions in other countries), and the fact that this winning sum was "fair" because winning against the (very narcissistic) TV host Stefan Raab is a huge achievement (this was marketed very aggressively by Stefan Raab himself) made this show highly popular in Germany, but to my knowledge the versions in other countries were not popular. Relevant is here that because Stefan Raab was so controversial and narcissistic, most people who watched the show really wanted the candidate to win (and get the "deserved" money) - if only for the fact that this made Stefan Raab look stupid.
bko 11mo ago
> Think of being a billionaire as a rare disease, though far less rare than it was a few decades ago—except that it’s a disease that’s self-inflicted, deserves no sympathy, and is easily cured by dispersal of the huge bolus of money choking their empathic awareness. I don't think people are a disease. I think of billionaires as people who mostly started businesses that were very successful. The fact that they started a successful business suggests they know something about the world that others don't (some insight). Millionaires can be lucky (happen to invest in Manhattan real estate or crypto) but to accumulate a billion is a different thing all together and a high signal that the person is extraordinary in some regard.
- surgical_fire 11mo ago
  To me it only suggests they are sociopaths. The common folk should generally just understand that billionaires are inherently evil, and everything they say and want will cause harm to society as a whole. It also suggests, typically, that they just inherited generatinal wealth from their sociopath ancestors.
- conception 11mo ago
  Note that it’s quite possible that the extraordinary thing is acute psychopathy and/or sociopathy to gather wealth at any cost.
  - bko 11mo ago
    Sure, that could be what results in billionaires. But I guess you would have to identify what opportunities you would have to take to become a billionaire that you don't take because it would be too mean. What's the model here? I hear billionaires "exploit" people, but anyone that's ever had to manage people, especially low wage employees, quickly realizes you can't just treat people like crap. Not for moral reasons, but it doesn't work. People will just quit on you on the spot. I've never heard any business owner espouse this theory because they're faced with the reality that building a business is hard and just being a dick doesn't work.
    - 11mo ago
pasojssj 11mo ago
[flagged]
randycupertino 11mo ago
This reminds me of when Trump was obsessed with Kristen Stewart's and Robert Patterson's breakup and would post about it all the time, and also when Elon Musk got involved with #freeBritney and was obsessed with Britney Spears. Like... why on earth are these grown men with very busy important jobs injecting themselves in these celebrity dramas, why are they tweeting about it, why do they think we care, and why is the media covering it!! https://www.reddit.com/r/popculturechat/comments/14wwff3/does_anyone_else_remember_trumps_intense/ https://www.reddit.com/r/popculturechat/comments/14wwff3/doe... https://nypost.com/2021/07/05/elon-musk-tweets-free-britney-gets-nearly-20m-retweets/ https://nypost.com/2021/07/05/elon-musk-tweets-free-britney-... https://www.imdb.com/news/ni60689959/ https://www.imdb.com/news/ni60689959/
- bdangubic 11mo ago
  cause they are neither grown men nor have busy and important jobs. I know cause I am and I got no time for that shit :)
  - randycupertino 11mo ago
    Like don't get me wrong sometimes I enjoy celebrity gossip (hurrah, Prince Andrew was stripped of his title and lost his tax-payer paid for house!), but I generally only comment about it to my partner and don't tweet about it, and also I am not President of the United States nor CEO of three companies. And if I was I would keep those things to myself and not interject to the world so they could all know my hot takes.
  - fragmede 11mo ago
    But yet you have time to comment here? I suspect you are also neither as well. :p
    - bdangubic 11mo ago
      ping me when you are a celebrity and I'll retract my statement ;)
johnea 11mo ago
I really agree with the overall gist of the article. Too bad it's racist and sexist, when the main point is about massive financial inequality...

66 points by robtherobber 11mo ago

Because America values money above everything else. Ask anyone outside America, and that is immediately clear to them. Yet Americans are so imbued with the normalization of transactionality in all aspects of life that they can't really understand why it's not ok that the pursuit of happiness has become simply the pursuit of riches. Want another example? Look at how y'all consider poverty as basically a personal bad choice.

0_____0 11mo ago
The AI boosters are sort of telling. Their bull case is that AGI/robotics could replace 100% of global GDP, which doesn't seem to register as a weird thing to want. Replace all labor on the planet and I'll be stinking rich!! That's an insane thing to want, regardless of whether it's even possible.
- ElevenLathe 11mo ago
  IMO it's a reasonable thing to want /alongside a massive and historic global reform package that redistributes the massive windfall it represents/. Wanting to replace all human labor under our current political economy is just a thinly-veiled wish for mass suffering, chaos, and death.
  - camillomiller 11mo ago
    The second part of your first sentence is like a full-on universe that they haven't even started to consider, which invalidates the first part completely.
9rx 11mo ago
But actually, it's because people have a limit on how many other people they can keep track of. Robin Dunbar, of Dunbar's number fame, suggested the limits were around 500 people as acquaintances and around 1,500 people whom you could recognize. Beyond that, other people may as well not exist. When communication at a distance was hard and the world was more insular, the faces you'd recognize would be mostly of people in your community. Still, even within a community, you were going to take more interest in the local movers and shakers over the hobo on the street. Our modern, interconnected global village just scales that up. We still focus on the movers and shakers and ignore the hobos just the same. But now, instead of everyone in a community recognizing the same 600 locals, everyone in the world now recognizes the same 600 people. Which is also how they become so rich. Need to buy a widget? You're not going to seek out a hobo to see if he has any in his beat up old shopping cart, are you? (well most won't, anyway) You're going to go to straight to the guy you already know. When communities were insular that meant some small number of people in the community were richer than the rest, but there was a pretty hard limit on how rich they could become when there were only so many local buyers. The difference now is, again, a matter of scale. When the entire world wants to buy from the same person, that hard limit becomes multiplied by a very large multiplier.
sharts 11mo ago
In America it seems the pursuit of happiness requires pursuit of riches. Just the fact that there is very little social safety net, people can go homeless due to medical bills, and the whole pull yourself up from your own bootstraps (because socialism and bailouts are only reserved for the wealthy and connected) —it seems obvious that valuing money becomes the main concern. Without the money you can’t really live let along thrive or be happy without constant anxiety.

api 11mo ago

Isn’t that obvious? Money buys things including attention.

blenderob 11mo ago
It's not that all obvious to me. Where I live the richest don't get this kind of attention very much. People know they're the richest and all that but you don't see their opinions broadcasted on every social media and news outlet. On the contrary, they're mostly out of sight, out of mind!
- idiotsecant 11mo ago
  Because they aren't buying newspapers. American rich people don't all have the common sense to just be rich and enjoy their opulent life discretely, they need to also insert themselves into the national dialogue.
- AnimalMuppet 11mo ago
  The US has never had a situation where the rule of law collapsed, and mobs were actively trying to kill the elite. ("Elite" here meaning those with extreme amounts of money or social status.) In places like Europe, they remember things like that. So if you're an elite there, you don't make waves or have a high profile, because you know from history that doing so can attract attention of a kind that you really don't want. But in the US, that's not in your history. So, especially if you're rather narcissistic, you think of using your wealth to get attention.

beeflet 11mo ago

Seems like overly long copium about nothing in particular. The author makes some assertions, like that elizabeth warren is a viable candidate or that the republican party will weaken in coming years due to demographic changes, or that shale gas is a bubble. But the way in which it is written reveals an insecurity that this may not be the case. The author expresses frustration that the new york times has a variety of perspectives. >It often seems as though the Democratic and Republican parties are unconsciously perceived as the wife and husband in a very, very traditional marriage, since the former is supposed to defer to and please the latter, and the latter is free to run roughshod over the former I think the author may be a bit trapped by their habit of seeing everything along gender lines

keiferski 11mo ago

I think there has actually been something of a cultural shift on this topic in the last ±decade or so. The word billionaire used to have more baked-in positive cultural energy, something laudable in-itself. Nowadays though it feels like the label has a negative tinge; not quite a bad thing, but not something that feels like a universal benefit either. This change probably tracks with the rise of populism.

Tarsul 11mo ago
It's weird to me as a German because growing up in the 90s exorbitant wealth was not seen as inherently good, if i had to guesstimate the general feeling - it was generally seen as inherently a-little-bit-worse-than-neutral (the saying "Reichtum stinkt" - meaning rich people stink, was quite common). However, and probably due to way too much cultural influence of US media (and tech) this general feeling changed a little bit more to the positive side (00s/2010s). But now that everything goes to shit, the feeling shifts again to more negative. At least that's my nonscientific interpretation of the historical feeling in Germany since the 90s. But would love studies about it, in general.
- jack_tripper 11mo ago
  >as a German because growing up in the 90s exorbitant wealth was not seen as inherently good That perception didn't prevent anyone in Germany from amassing obscene wealth, often due to their political connections during and post WW2. They're just very discreet and hidden and don't flaunt it publicly. What's needed to prevent wealth inequality is laws and enforcement, not relying on the perception of the masses since billionaires don't care what people think about them.
- jaapz 11mo ago
  > Reichtum stinkt Funny, in Dutch we have "Rijke stinkerd" which means basically "stinking rich person".
- aleph_minus_one 11mo ago
  Relevant concerning this topic: From 1993 to 2000 (with some attempts of later revivals) there was a TV game show in some German commercial television channel (RTL) named "Die 100.000 Mark Show" ("The 100.000 Mark Show" - (100.000 mark is a little bit more than 50.000 Euro using the conversion factor of 1.95583)) where the winners could win 100.00 mark. > https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_100.000_Mark_Show https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_100.000_Mark_Show This was the first game show in German TV that offered such a huge amount of prize money and was initially criticized for this. In 1999, in Germany "Wer wird Millionär" (basically the German version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?") - initially with 1 million mark (2002 it was even changed to EUR 1 million) - started. > https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wer_wird_Million%C3%A4r%3F https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wer_wird_Million%C3%A4r%3F I can also remember that at this time the show was criticized for this large possible prize money, but got more accepted over time, in particular because the host of this show (Günther Jauch) was very popular (he was basically the reason why "Wer wird Millionär" was very popular in Germany, but many other similar quiz shows were not). In 2000 another TV channel (Sat.1) made a heavily marketed experiment with "Die Chance deines Lebens" (The chance of your life) > https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Chance_deines_Lebens https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Chance_deines_Lebens where you could even win up to 10 million mark. While this was again criticized by the media, the show was a failure because it was too slow-paced, and nobody won the 10.000.000 mark in any of the broadcasted episodes (which would have caused media headlines and thus popularity). On the other hand, from 2006 to 2015, there was a game show "Schlag den Raab" (Beat the Raab) > https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlag_den_Raab https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlag_den_Raab where you had to win against the (at that time very popular, but incredibly narcissistic) TV host Stefan Raab in a lot of games. There were also variants of this TV show in other countries, but only in the German version the winning sum was very large (at least EUR 500.000, with the money going into a jackpot if Stefan Raab won in the episode, so (see Wikipedia article) winning sums up to EUR 3.5 million were achieved). Basically the fact that the winning sum was very large (in opposite to the versions in other countries), and the fact that this winning sum was "fair" because winning against the (very narcissistic) TV host Stefan Raab is a huge achievement (this was marketed very aggressively by Stefan Raab himself) made this show highly popular in Germany, but to my knowledge the versions in other countries were not popular. Relevant is here that because Stefan Raab was so controversial and narcissistic, most people who watched the show really wanted the candidate to win (and get the "deserved" money) - if only for the fact that this made Stefan Raab look stupid.

bko 11mo ago

> Think of being a billionaire as a rare disease, though far less rare than it was a few decades ago—except that it’s a disease that’s self-inflicted, deserves no sympathy, and is easily cured by dispersal of the huge bolus of money choking their empathic awareness. I don't think people are a disease. I think of billionaires as people who mostly started businesses that were very successful. The fact that they started a successful business suggests they know something about the world that others don't (some insight). Millionaires can be lucky (happen to invest in Manhattan real estate or crypto) but to accumulate a billion is a different thing all together and a high signal that the person is extraordinary in some regard.

surgical_fire 11mo ago
To me it only suggests they are sociopaths. The common folk should generally just understand that billionaires are inherently evil, and everything they say and want will cause harm to society as a whole. It also suggests, typically, that they just inherited generatinal wealth from their sociopath ancestors.
conception 11mo ago
Note that it’s quite possible that the extraordinary thing is acute psychopathy and/or sociopathy to gather wealth at any cost.
- bko 11mo ago
  Sure, that could be what results in billionaires. But I guess you would have to identify what opportunities you would have to take to become a billionaire that you don't take because it would be too mean. What's the model here? I hear billionaires "exploit" people, but anyone that's ever had to manage people, especially low wage employees, quickly realizes you can't just treat people like crap. Not for moral reasons, but it doesn't work. People will just quit on you on the spot. I've never heard any business owner espouse this theory because they're faced with the reality that building a business is hard and just being a dick doesn't work.
  - 11mo ago

pasojssj 11mo ago

[flagged]

randycupertino 11mo ago

This reminds me of when Trump was obsessed with Kristen Stewart's and Robert Patterson's breakup and would post about it all the time, and also when Elon Musk got involved with #freeBritney and was obsessed with Britney Spears. Like... why on earth are these grown men with very busy important jobs injecting themselves in these celebrity dramas, why are they tweeting about it, why do they think we care, and why is the media covering it!! https://www.reddit.com/r/popculturechat/comments/14wwff3/does_anyone_else_remember_trumps_intense/ https://www.reddit.com/r/popculturechat/comments/14wwff3/doe... https://nypost.com/2021/07/05/elon-musk-tweets-free-britney-gets-nearly-20m-retweets/ https://nypost.com/2021/07/05/elon-musk-tweets-free-britney-... https://www.imdb.com/news/ni60689959/ https://www.imdb.com/news/ni60689959/

bdangubic 11mo ago
cause they are neither grown men nor have busy and important jobs. I know cause I am and I got no time for that shit :)
- randycupertino 11mo ago
  Like don't get me wrong sometimes I enjoy celebrity gossip (hurrah, Prince Andrew was stripped of his title and lost his tax-payer paid for house!), but I generally only comment about it to my partner and don't tweet about it, and also I am not President of the United States nor CEO of three companies. And if I was I would keep those things to myself and not interject to the world so they could all know my hot takes.
- fragmede 11mo ago
  But yet you have time to comment here? I suspect you are also neither as well. :p
  - bdangubic 11mo ago
    ping me when you are a celebrity and I'll retract my statement ;)

johnea 11mo ago

I really agree with the overall gist of the article. Too bad it's racist and sexist, when the main point is about massive financial inequality...