[nyxxie]

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.

[ThrowawayR2]

> 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_r...

[BaronSamedi]

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]

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...

[BaronSamedi]

Thank you for posting the link. I have read this. What do you think about Turchin's theory? I'm unsure whether I agree with it or not.

[photojosh]

I find it plausible, because of my understanding of how revolutions happen. At the least, it's one view of things.

People who are really scraping to get by don't have the mental bandwidth to put time into revolution. You need people with spare time to organise to kick things off, and only then once you've started a movement you can get the masses on your side because you're offering an alternative.

[mpweiher]

> "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."

[joe_the_user]

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.

[gnicholas]

> the thing is, most middle or above folks with an once of sophistication can sense the trust fund kid a mile away

My experience has been the same as the author's. My college classmates (at Swarthmore) and I were repeatedly surprised when we learned that our friends were trust fund kids. I remember junior year we found out that one kid was super wealthy because he bought a last-minute cross-country plane ticket, first class. Even his roommates, who had lived with him for years, had no clue he was wealthy.

Another time, I learned that a girl was wealthy because she bought an iPod ($400 in 2004!) on a whim. I'd previously thought she was upper-middle class because she drove a Honda CR-V and didn't have any other trappings of wealth.

[throwsurieswq]

I'm always reminded of my college friend who went to an international private school in Asia.

Her classmates were the children of billionaires and sultans. Everyone in the school would know because you could just Google them and find paparazzi pictures of them with the parents.

She said for the most part, they did act like normal teens. Just more aloof because the second they left the school, they had a contingent of people, like bodyguards and chauffeurs. Perhaps people like that change more when they are in college.

[goatinaboat]

Both of those examples are put-it-on-a-card-and-worry-about-it-later territory for even normal, middle-class people. Super-wealthy is buying a yacht on a whim.

[high_derivative]

I think this is a very common perception issue. I am at a university with enormous wealth concentration, but wealth is opaque and everyone orientates upwards.

For students without means or parents buying them toys, someone buying an iPhone on a whim because their old broke is rich. Having any money to spend on non-essentials is rich.

Students who can buy an iPhone on a whim because it's just a random expense for their parents would never think of themselves as wealthy - that's the people who go on first class trips and wear designer clothes without thinking twice.

The people who wear overpriced clothes and go on expensive trips don't feel rich either, they don't even have a building at the university in their family name, and no multi-generational wealth.

I briefly went out with the daughter of an Asian billionaire tycoon, the kind with lots of buildings named after. She never mentioned it or brought it up and I wouldn't even have known until it suddenly clicked about her name and the name of some buildings. I never asked her who she orientated upwards to, though. Some richer tycoon's family?

[gnicholas]

First class round-trip tickets across the US? Thats a thousand bucks. And $400 for a music player? Those are not normal expenditures for middle-class 20-year-olds (in 2007, before MP3 players were ubiquitous and inexpensive).

Regardless, I’m not saying these are only ever purchased by the ultra-wealthy. I’m saying this was the first sign anyone had that these kids had any money whatsoever. It turned out both have trust funds and are extraordinarily wealthy.

[goatinaboat]

That particular example resonated with me. I'm not super-rich, far from it, I certainly wasn't even earning much in that time-frame. And I did a similar thing because it was the last ticket left and I had to get to a funeral. There must have been other clues that lead to the conclusion that they were trust fund kids!

[ikeyany]

The last ticket left was a first class ticket?

[nyxxie]

> 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]

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.

[jayd16]

Calloquially this is known as humility.

[austhrow743]

A thing being known secretly and a thing being known openly are two very different scenarios. That they can't completely conceal their wealth and that they know that, is not a reason to believe they're trying to conceal their wealth.

[Dylan16807]

> 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.)

[refurb]

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.

This is one of those “facts” that simply isn’t true.

US taxes have become more progressive over time.

Look at the first chart: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/02/the-s...

[Dylan16807]

On the other hand, this chart: https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/taHyLEiwFvxZO4U3BfvmJ...

The top percent or two are sucking up increasingly large amounts of GDP, and they're not paying taxes appropriate for being at that level.

And capital gains taxes push the high end down even more.

[refurb]

That chart doesn’t tell you much at all. Who cares what the marginal rate is, if you’re allowed huge deductions (as was common back in the 1950’s).

That’s why the marginal rate was higher 40 years ago, but the amount of taxes collected was lower.

[nyxxie]

> 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.

[Dylan16807]

The game isn't half as fair as it should be. I see great problem in that.

Even though some fraction of the disparity is earned, a lot clearly isn't.

[Invictus0]

The game was and has never been fair. The parent is merely arguing that you should blame the game, and not the players.

[Dylan16807]

You can blame the players for not helping other players, and not wanting infrastructure that takes excess resources from the winners to help all players.

[nyxxie]

> You can blame the players for not helping other players

Assume we did, what is the correct amount of help that the successful players should help the unsuccessful ones? Unless it's codified into the game itself (being made to pay more taxes based on wealth for example), it's unfair to expect arbitrary players to pay some undefined price to the satisfaction of another arbitrary set of players.

[silvestrov]

> 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]

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.

[rossdavidh]

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]

>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]

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]

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]

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.

[shkkmo]

> 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.

[chongli]

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.