Great expectations
Just how bad are wealthy people for us?
One thing we’re often asked to consider is: “When was the world ‘great’?”
You can safely ignore the pitch from politicians because they have no fucking idea: They just pick great aspects from any moment in history, depending on what their tribe currently believe motivates and satiates human flourishing. There are times in history we were more Godfearing, more economically equal, more aware of our hierarchical place, more technically innovative, more productive, more healthy, happy, or mentally-well-adjusted…
It’s been topical to think of “the time immediately after World War 2” as pretty great. Of course, that requires us to ignore some ableism, sexism and racism, but I actually think we can for our purposes here: Society is pretty resistant to going backwards once it’s taking a decent civic leap. I’m not old, but I’m old enough to remember how universally-problematic it was to be “a gay”; I remember the concerted “Girls Can Do Anything” campaigns; I recall when “I have black friends” wasn't just a punch line. The bigotry inherent in things like that is by no means gone but, for most of us, it seems pretty passé now—especially as we distract ourselves with the, infinitely more fraught, complexity of things like gender spectrums and sentient rights! No matter how conservatively politicians talk, it’s hard now to conceive of a world where people, in general, just stop believing women are capable of working outside the home, or stop thinking of homosexuality as just pretty ordinary human stuff.
Now, I’ve also lived the somewhat-charmed life of an able cis white male so, if you’re still going through 40-year-old crap that I never have, I don’t intend to minimise it. But, to give it some concrete perspective, a few days back a local politician proudly proclaimed he did the grocery shopping once a month to give “my wife a break” from it. And, you’ll be pleased to know, no one defended that truly idiotic statement. Not more than 40 years ago, that sort of misogynism would have been received without a blink.
We do evolve—unevenly at first—but in ways that you can be confident it’s hard to walk back from.
Anyway, that’s a little off-track. My point is, I will admit to being as jaundiced as the next person by panic about some ‘demagogue’, rolling in and replacing all our social progress with hate and ignorance. But I need to keep checking myself. Once real social progress is seen, I believe it’s harder to unsee than we tend to fear.
So, let’s picture that world of the 1950s, only with the degree, and pace, of social progressiveness and the science of today. What were the characteristics that made it great? High taxes and a hopeful outlook perhaps?
Let’s park that for a bit.
There are two—seemingly opposing—truths about ‘wealth’ in abstraction, and neither is the complete story alone:
Wealth provides a foundation (and perhaps motivation), for the kind of risk-taking that progresses all of humanity; and
Undistributed wealth divides humanity into haves and have-nots, creating the kind of resentment and exploitation that is a drag on progress.
Essentially, for wealth to buttress risk, it must be somewhat exceptional.
Both truths have their sworn disciples of course. Free market advocates believe in the power of the individual human spirit to actualise everything we might need to flourish. The planned economy or anarchical types believe humans evolved to prosper through collectivity.
Neither has an incontrovertible case: The free market consistently fails without state subsidies, tariffs, and bail-outs; and it is, equally, incredibly shortsighted to assume every person has an equal measure to offer collected human advancement.
So, we are left in a bind. Progress relies on incentivising the efforts of strong individuals, via community-supported and, therefore, community-beneficial choices.
Think back to that tableau we paused on, of the aspirational post-war world supplemented by our contemporary social progressiveness and science. I mentioned it left us with high taxes and optimism. You’ve probably already noticed, those things together appear to contradict the truths about wealth.
This is because, when we talk about what wealth is, we largely do it in abstract: In soundbites about fairness, productivity, culture, or motivation.
The wealth of those soundbites could be about education or opportunity or accessibility or diversity. But, in practice, wealth is basically “private property” now: Not property like your toothbrush or pyjamas, but actualising things that provide leverage to ‘succeed’ in life (in ways that your pyjamas likely don’t!).
Robert Shiller described much of the value created by this kind of wealth as a “chain across a river”; where the owner of some piece of land, across which a well-used transport river flows, can make their land valuable by simply putting up a chain barrier and imposing tolls on the community who pass through on the otherwise natural, communal river resource.
Not all private wealth is a chain across a river, but this is the tendency for property wealth—that's how we start with the “convenience and cost savings” of a superstore; then end up with a sad main street full of empty shopfronts. And this is perfectly rational because just ‘owning’ stuff is a pointless exercise in a system that demands wealth operate as motivation. You need to somehow leverage that ownership.
Now, your perspective might be that the landowner earned the right to exploit the resources on their land wealth, but to believe that, you must also accept the likelihood that exploitation was involved in originally acquiring the land. You must, eventually, accept the (ironically) nihilistic view that progress and exploitation are therefore homogeneous: A world without any practical use for justice.
This is obviously a broad sweep; I realise that even the most committed libertarians exist on a spectrum. However, even though this is not real for life, it is real for ideology, and it is that which prevents us from thinking sensibly about wealth.
Ideology essentially is the stories we tell ourselves about what things are ‘right’—legal, moral, or social.
Any compelling story must have heroes and villains, a history, and a future. So, when we convince ourselves that something is a ‘right’ via these stories, it becomes a thing with good and bad guys, and a purpose. And something we are obligated to defend.
So, if the perception is wealth matters for progress, and the reality is wealth is primarily property, and if property ownership is an enshrined right because of that, then the more wealth you have the more rights you have.
And the more we are obligated to defend that distortion.
See, property ownership is not like other rights, like the right to speak freely. We, sensibly, regard the right to free speech as being on a continuum: We understand that it benefits all of us that there is some limits to the right (the “don’t yell ‘FIRE’ in a crowded theatre” analogy1); and we also understand that any speech rights we agree to expand benefit everyone equally.
Property rights are different because their limits can be expanded opaquely and benefit a shrinking range of people. The more property (wealth) you have, the more rights you have. You might think we can just put that to a test in a functioning legal or democratic system, but wealth-as-progress advantages you in those places as well. And, even if it didn’t, the narrow nature of property changes how the right operates: When we collectively agree to stop writing “Fuck” as “F***” everyone from poets to newsreaders to substackers all benefit from that expanded human right; When a judge decides “cartoon mice should have a carve-out copyright extension of 25 years” only Disney benefits.
I’m not saying we should do away with conventional property rights (well, not without further discussion!) but, just pointing out that wealth is a naturally skewed right because the point of private property is that it is not collectively owned (like speech). And we should treat it like that.
Only, if there’s one thing you might have gleaned from this series, it is we don’t. We do get angry about the unfairness of it, but then catch ourselves, because we’re trained to square the circle, with meritocracy.
We can’t change the fact that some people are more agile, more (conventionally) intelligent, or prettier… We very likely can’t everyone to be more confident or wittier… I expect no amount of harsh policing, or wrap-around culturally-cognisant support, or free top-notch education will completely eliminate shitheads.
So, knowing that, does this matter? Is this just the best way to allocate opportunity? Is there a practical danger?
I think there is… Just maybe not the kind that ends as explicitly as guillotines on front lawns.
We’re so outraged by the drawing pins being pushed into our eyes that we fail to notice the filleting knife being inserted into the small of our back.
For an increasingly large percentage of us, this all means, there’s a ‘thing’ we’ve been taught to understand as ‘a human right’, and it is shrinking smaller and smaller out to the distant horizon because of tricks like those available in the Alternative Universe of Wealth.
But the kicker is, we blame ourselves for it being out of reach; we are not “good enough”. If everything is “fair and possible”—as seemingly promised by the ‘young property investor’, the ‘street kid turned good’, or the ‘mum who started her global business while raising three kids’—then it must be that we are just not smart or hard-working enough to be worthy of that human right.
Eventually, while we still think of it as a right, we no longer have any context for how to value this thing. And, we’ve had some historical experience to show us what happens when collective ideas about the value of rights get lost: Fascism or, maybe best case, aristocracy.
Even if we manage to tenuously hold onto something that resembles democracy, what we’re left with is a majority of people (because it is the majority) facing impossible odds of achieving the kinds of Instagram-gilded lifestyles they are told are available “to all of us”. When it becomes increasingly clear that’s not the whole truth, can you blame people for lashing out? For being drawn into tribes that tell them who they might blame instead? …Refugees, politicians, the “woke”, the ‘Gates and Soros’ elites, the fossil-fuel executives, the Lizard-people… Eventually, blame becomes the only sensible answer for why your hard work never pays off.
And that’s not even touching on how much our current flavour of progress will cost us. Right now, for most of us, “climate change” is a series of mostly-distant ‘events’—wild fires, refugees, flooding—that can still conceivably be blamed on bad luck or ‘bad’ people. But it’s increasingly going to come to everyone’s doorstep in the form of insurance costs, disruption, and real reasons to fear for your own life.
“It’s not the system, it’s those bloody gender-traitors reading stories to kids at the local library!”
This is the second abstract truth about wealth, in practice.
Broken social expectation might break the vulnerable first, but it eventually breaks everyone. A world that is simply a dick-measuring competition (or accounting trick-measuring competition), has an inevitability to it—progress through increasingly-rational exploitation.
And so, in practice, that second truth—the drag on progress—might start as the predictable anger, fear, and manufactured-insanity of the people left behind in a wealth-oriented world, but it eventually becomes some form of authoritarianism.
This is because, when exploitation becomes the literal foundation of ‘growth’ and ‘progress’ we become suspicious of every transaction. You can already see this growing in the enormous influencer economy—in the sketchy sales of “one weird tricks”, “passive income”, and “#sponsored” secrets to success. And, more maliciously, in the climate change and vaccine denial of grifters with irrelevant PhDs. As the line between ambition and legality gets danced over in service of human advancement, it increasingly leaves with two social choices: The unpalatable rolling out of guillotines, or the imposition of ever-harsher consequences and bureaucracy simply to prevent people “taking the piss”.
It is not the world of flying cars and space exploration that you might have imagined in your ideological story. You can’t earn your way out of civilisation. That world will be one of police and corruption and high fences. A profoundly unsatisfying place for anyone to exist in; and a profoundly sad fate for human civilisation.
This is the first abstract truth about wealth, in practice
And so, both abstract truths about wealth are inevitably fulfilled, if all we do is allow the kind of ‘private property’ wealth to proliferate: We motivate ourselves into ever-greater friction.
We’re not there yet. But I wanted to lay it out, to demonstrate how something like “high taxes and optimism” is not just a convenient summary of a great society, but a practical recipe for one.
It is the hardest thing in the world to cater for both people who have the natural abilities and motivation to pull civilisation forward a few short steps, and also for people who, through misfortune of genetics or timing or geography, will mostly only be carried during their time on earth. But optimism for the future is powerful: It gets people out of bed, and causes them to have and love children; it builds businesses, and makes art, and forms community, and encourages diversity.
What we think of as ‘wealth’ (private property) can do some of that too but, by its nature, only for a shrinking minority. If we build our collective idea about wealth out of a reality that only the tiniest number of us can ever experience, we won’t be build it for very much longer.
This isn’t a case of just dealing with bad wealthy people. It’s universal acceptance of the idea that, right now, private wealth is the hero in our story, so any barrier to private wealth must be the villain.
I want to be clear, I’m not attempting to write policy here. I’m just contemplating what the hero and villian in our stories should be. If we allow private property to define ‘wealth’ for us, and we make wealth the aim and the ruler of the game, things are just going to eventually suck. If we redefine wealth, or at least temper it properly with taxes or other limits, we can turn it into a hopeful outlook for us all—and that’s when the world gets great.
-T
Not an actual law, but certainly a social obligation.