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posted by martyb on Monday October 19 2015, @11:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the can't-buy-me-love dept.

In recent years, members of the 1% have been singled out by protesters seeking to highlight the growing disparity between rich and poor. Now Jana Kasperkevic writes in The Guardian that it can be very stressful to be rich. “It’s really isolating to have a lot of money. It can be scary – people’s reaction to you,” says Barbara Nusbaum, an expert in money psychology. "There is a fair amount of isolation if you are wealthy."

According to Clay Cockrell, who provides therapy for the rich, this means the rich tend to hang out with other rich poeple, not out of snobbery, but in order to be around those who understand them and their problems. One big problem is not knowing if your friends are friends with you or your money. “Someone else who is also a billionaire — they don’t want anything from you! Never being able to trust your friendships with people of different means, I think that is difficult,” says Cockrell. “As the gap has widened, they [the rich] have become more and more isolated.”

Cockrell says that a common mistake that many of the his wealthy clients make is letting their money define them. “I don’t think it’s healthy to discount your problems. If you are part of the 1%, you still have problems and they are legitimate to you. Even when you say: ‘I don’t have to struggle for money’, there are other parts of your life. Money is not the only thing that defines you. Your problems are legitimate.” To avoid problems, some Americans have taken to keeping their wealth secret. “We talk about it as stealth wealth," says Jamie Traeger-Muney. "There are a lot of people that are hiding their wealth because they are concerned about negative judgment."


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday October 19 2015, @08:16PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Monday October 19 2015, @08:16PM (#252006) Journal

    Rich people are very good at acquiring money, that's why they're rich.

    This is a common illusion, and is itself an echo of Social Darwinist thinking. In sum, the rich are rich because they deserve it, and likewise the poor deserve what they get. I grew up with that understanding of the world, but after 20 years of living in NYC and rubbing elbows with many very rich people, I'd have to say that very few rich people are rich because they deserve it, because they've earned it.

    They are good at rigging the system and having no compunction about doing it. For them, playing fair, playing by the rules, and "giving back" are PR slogans. Only suckers do that for real. And doing evil things only become evil if they get caught, and this is crucial, it costs them money and reputation too. Else, getting caught is a throw-away line at a cocktail party or a fortnight's gossipy whisper. But come the week after that everyone will be back in bed together for the next score.

    If you can step back from the obvious outrage of it all and see it with the eyes of an impartial observer, it's not hard to see that the phenomenon the article is talking about is a self-destructive one for the rich as well as everyone else.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
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  • (Score: 2) by SanityCheck on Monday October 19 2015, @09:26PM

    by SanityCheck (5190) on Monday October 19 2015, @09:26PM (#252046)

    "Deserving" is a subjective [differencebetween.net] metric. It is very hard to attribute who is deserving of wealth because it is truly in eye of beholder. Is a nice person more deserving than a dick? Is a nice person who inherited their wealth more deserving than a dick who worked for it?

    While GP does sound like a Social Darwinist, you sound like the exact opposite. You come across as very jaded by your own anecdotal data. But I don't blame you personally. It is hard, if not impossible, to come up with objective reasons for wealth distribution. Thus far I have only come up with two, which kind of support Social Darwinism, but not by design, and they deal with wealth which is a long term concept (usually built over years or generations).

    People cannot have more money than brains. This does kind of support the classic Social Darwinism. But it is slightly deeper than that. A person who has money given to him which he has not earned with talent or brains alone, may squander this wealth because he is foolish in managing it. This can of course be fixed by using a 3rd party to manage your wealth, but this also requires a level of intelligence or at very least prudence. And person who is very bright or talented may find himself with wealth, even if he is from meager background. Of course if you are stupid and poor you are SOL, but this is about explaining wealth distribution, not justifying it, that would be subjective.

    People cannot have less money than greed. There is another reason why some people accumulate or hold on to money, the pure desire to have it. And in this context I use greed very broadly, but it is a word that really fits. I don't use it subjectively, it is neither good nor bad, and can be used to describe either situations. For example, if you walk 10 blocks to save $1, that is a kind of greed. You do not wish to part with your money. True this may be viewed positively, and like I said, I do not vilify the word nor the act. Likewise, you may only tip the waiter 10% because you do not think he deserves more of your money because of X, Y, Z. That too is a form of greed. It could be warranted, he could have had a shitty day and done a shitty job. Some people who are less greedy might think he had a shitty day, others might think he just did a shitty job to justify their greed.

    These tiny tendencies to "not part with money" add up over course of a lifetime. True not everyone has the same level of greed throughout their life, so of course you can't just measure the persons overall level of greed as say being very generous at the end of your life may wipe out all wealth you generated through being greedy, but a person who is greedy has an easier time maintaining and increasing their level of wealth than someone who is not.

    (Apologies if I have posted this before in another thread, at least I'm consistent in my thinking. Double apologies if this is too far in the realm of philosophy, which I too find offensive :)

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by termigator on Tuesday October 20 2015, @01:55AM

      by termigator (4271) on Tuesday October 20 2015, @01:55AM (#252140)

      You are redefining greed that boarders on doublespeak. Doing something to save money is not greed in its own right, it can be the management of limited resources. Not tipping a waiter could just be driven on not rewarding bad service, not a reflection of greed. It is hard to give credence to your perspective when you redefine a term that has a well defined meeting. You need to use something other than "greed".

      As for the rich, generally most people have nothing against the concept of someone being rich. It is a matter of fairness. When there is an ever increasing minority rigging the system to accumulate more wealth unfairly, the majority gets upset. Humans are extremely sensitivity to fairness, where it appears to an evolutionary behavioral trait:

      http://news.gsu.edu/2014/09/18/research-shows-human-sense-fairness-evolved-favor-long-term-cooperation/ [gsu.edu]

      There are some with wealth that see this and try to correct, but the sociopathic rich have gotten efficient and defining the rules of the game, rules where they always win and everyone else loses.

      • (Score: 2) by SanityCheck on Tuesday October 20 2015, @03:31AM

        by SanityCheck (5190) on Tuesday October 20 2015, @03:31AM (#252158)

        I don't know, I find the word fits pretty well, with the exception of the inordinate nature of it. (Anyway I advise you not to read on as I tend to blabber on and on, possibly reaching a point where I agree with you at the end).

        The reason why I define greed in such a way is because some choice may seem reasonable but outcome can be the same as most literary interpretation of greed. Say I walk instead of taking a bus and save $1 a day. And another 300 people do the same on the same route. Now all of a sudden a bus line that was profitable is costing tons of money because there isn't enough riders (yes I know almost all public transport already losses money on each ride, but assume it was making money). Now some executive looks at a report and decides we should cut this line to save money, and few bus drivers lose their jobs and there are now some people stuck without a bus and are forced to walk or find alternate transportation. People get mad about the greedy company and greedy executive that cut the bus service, put people out of work, and force senior citizens to walk. Meanwhile not the 300 riders who elected to walk instead, changing the balance sheets are none the wiser. The bus drivers may even stage a little protest, you get a fluff piece in local media denouncing the greed, a whole dog and pony show. Then the people who started walking will read the paper and say "A ha, good thing I started walking, I would have a bus to ride anyway!" It is easy for people to ignore thousands of little events, instead focusing all their attention on the few bigger ones. It's just the way our brain filters things.

        This is just a basic example, but it is exactly how the invisible hand of the market works. Ideally no wealth was squandered, and the people who pocketed the difference will spend it on something else, which will create demand for something, and the bus drivers who lost their jobs would get work doing whatever the hell else needs being done. Yes there are many exceptions to people losing work (like automation) which are not so straight forward, but in this example there is no exception to be made because that is not what is being discussed. So assuming these people spend the money elsewhere, nothing is really changed. But if they instead hold on to the money due to "greed," now we have a problem (This is actually where I personally feel the most guilt when I try to withhold spending money, since I know it can have adverse impact on demand).

        In regards to the rest, accumulation of wealth cannot be deemed fair or unfair because of its subjective nature. It can only be perceived as either or. But consider this: if one person accumulates non stop while other do not, he will eventually have the bulk of wealth even if he does not employ anything you would deem nefarious. Since wealth allows for more efficient accumulation of wealth, capitalism 101, his efforts will just accelerate organically. So unless you have constant redistribution, eventually someone will start pointing the finger claiming it's not fair. That is because people do have strong reactions to what they perceive as unfair, like your article points out. So what started as a simple and "fair" way of gathering wealth, is now a big target. But it is a proper reaction even if it is for the wrong reasons.

        Lets talk about equitable share, where you give up more than you have to to make things appear more fair. This is bologna to be honest. However they acquire money, stealing, hard work, bribery, selling orphans' organs.... doesn't matter because that is not what I see as the problem. The problem is when they have this stupid money, they never fuckin' spend it. They don't have to just give it away, but they could at least spend it. That is what is breaking the Capitalistic system. If they were not so efficient at holding onto their riches, there would be no problem. The capital simply evaporates from circulation, only making rounds in the Casinos down on Wallstreet. Which would be good enough mechanism for redistribution (despite the layers of bs and inefficiency) if any of those shitty companies that get access to the capital spent it in the U.S. The way things are now we would see more of the money if they were bidding on horse races on Mars.

        Where was I... yes, you are right, it's all globalization's fault. Of course I can write another essay defending globalization because it will fix things in about a century and everything will go back to normal. Of course most people can't wait that long for a decent job.