The Blinding Effects of Being Really, Really Rich
Why do wealthy people spend so much time shaming the rest of us?
The 90% of us who haven’t managed to hoard 76% of the wealth in America are often written off, especially by Republicans, as having character flaws that prevent us from making choices that would lead us to being a Rich Person. In response to the GOP’s savage proposed cuts to health care, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), gifted us with this insight:
Americans have choices. And they’ve got to make a choice. So maybe, rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and they want to go spend hundreds of dollars on, maybe they should invest that in health care.
The working class is constantly being informed of their supposed deficiencies in a way loosely packaged as mentorship.
Wealthy men and women alike tell less wealthy women to forcefully negotiate their salaries. Rich people with degrees tell poor people to get degrees (and then more advanced/more prestigious/STEM degrees). Of course you’re not building wealth, they say. You’re not even investing. And if young people do manage to save a few bucks but still find the price of housing insurmountable, they’re told to buy fewer avocados (which many of my peers can’t afford to even lust after in the grocery store).
What they’re really saying is to be born luckier. To make yourself whiter. To be more like them. And if you can’t, you’re probably just lazy.
But we know that climbing the next rung on the economic ladder isn’t simply a matter of hard work and tenacity. The unwillingness of the working class to take chances on the stock market and flit around between tech startups isn’t a collective defect — it’s an attempt at self-preservation. We can’t afford to take risks that might reap grand returns. When 69% of Americans have less than $1,000 in savings, the stakes are just too high.
The allure of building wealth isn’t to satisfy our material desires. What we’re lusting after is the peace of mind that we suspect comes along with knowing that our current and future well-being isn’t dependent on things going right all the time. And rich people? They don’t have to worry about that. As a result, their perceptions of risk-taking are seriously askew.
Our friends who make it to college and land jobs at Microsoft won’t have to watch their parents decay in a dismal Medicaid-funded nursing home (or on the street, if Trump’s budget gets its way). Barron Trump won’t join the masses who are tweeting at Nicki Minaj for the chance to get a fraction of his school bills paid. And he won’t have to set up a GoFundMe campaign to finance treatment for a pre-existing condition, because dying of something curable is for suckers — poor suckers.
Most people who have experienced wild financial success just don’t understand this reality. Peter Wehner of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (a Christian conservative who has served in the last three Republican administrations) thinks that the inability (or unwillingness) to acknowledge objective truths like these has spread from academia into politics and society at large. He calls it moral confusion.
The comfortably wealthy don’t know what it’s like to be perpetually confined in a terrifyingly low economic bracket, because the one thing they all have in common is that they escaped — sometimes by birth. And they can’t accept that they might not have done so by way of their own brilliance or the merits of their ancestors.
For the rest, the American dream eludes us over and over again. Because social and economic suppression share overlapping root causes. And it’s really simple for the powerful to keep it that way.
Here’s an example:
Seattle used to have a method of housing segregation called redlining. The whole city was drawn up with racial borders that were written into neighborhood housing deeds. Redlining dictated what kinds of people banks would approve for home mortgages in certain areas, and it worked very well at keeping undesirables out of Seattle neighborhoods (except for Central Seattle, where white people didn’t want to live).
Housing deeds in my neighborhood, Ravenna, used to contain this phrase:
No person other than one of the white race shall be permitted to occupy any portion of any lot in said plat or of any building thereon, except a domestic servant actually employed by a white occupant of such building.
The definition of an undesirable varied by neighborhood. People cut off from any real estate worth having included “Hebrews” (Jews), “Ethiopians” (Africans), “Malays” (Filipinos), and “the Asiatic race”. Clyde Hill was restricted to “Aryans only”.
Redlining isn’t just some backwards practice that we left behind in the last century. Homeowners associations couldn’t change the discriminatory language in their deeds until 2006, when Senate Bill 6169 was passed to allow it. And even though the words were changed, the segregation of neighborhoods in Seattle is still in full force — just harder to name now. It takes funding to run studies that identify the housing discrimination based on race, national origin, sexual orientation, and gender identity that so many people can tell you is definitely a thing. And money isn’t exactly pouring in to find out such non-sexy things.
But the way our society is set up means that the wealth of your neighbors defines your trajectory. Because our state funds schools through local property taxes, where you buy or rent a house dictates exactly what quality of education your kids will receive. And later, the value of your estate that will be passed on to them. Your assets are exactly the size of your safety net.
It’s hard to know if policies meant to mitigate social discrimination are working. A trailblazing study by my badass professor Marieka Klawitter, the guest on our podcast this week (link below!), suggested that the first thirty-ish years of workplace anti-discrimination LGBT policies (no Q or I or A yet) did diddly-squat for lesbians. The strongest effects were found for gay white men in the private sector who already placed in the upper half of the earnings distribution — individuals with lots of other social bargaining power to draw from.
We can’t solve economic insecurity if we don’t talk about it with brutal honesty. Commiserating over dream houses and vacations is an easy and acceptable form of envy to share with our fellow Poor People. It’s much harder to admit to ourselves and others that what we’re actually scared of is remaining vulnerable.
So let’s all call it exactly like it is, really loudly: the objective truth is that our economy and society are working in tandem to keep the suppressed exactly where they are. The attainability of moving up a couple rungs on our sections of the economic ladder keeps the subtler suppressions under pretty good wraps, and it’s working really well for the rich and powerful. More for them.
