The Alternative Universe of Wealth, part 2
Each dip and dive more magically-thrilling than the last!!
This is the second stop on our tour. Don’t miss the twists and turns and the slickly produced, post-turnstile, Backstory-Queue-Experience™ of Part 1
A lot of what makes it hard for us to appreciate the power of wealth is our tendency to think the ultra-rich simply live ‘bigger’ lives than us:
We might have a little dinghy; they might have a super-yacht… But they’re both just “boats”.
We might own our home; they might own a home for each month… But they’re all just “places to live”.
We might have a credit card; they might have a line-of-credit… But it’s all just “debt”.
Because we think like this, we are genuinely awful at appreciating—and therefore properly tempering—how wealth works in our society.
That’s why we’re exploring the Alternative Universe of Wealth by way of idioms that have one meaning to normal folk, among The 99%, and mean something else entirely to The 1%.
We already visited Money Working and Saving Pennies, in Part 1.
Let’s do some more…
“The only certainties in life are death and taxes”
Most of us live our lives under some cloud of uncertainty: We could lose our job or be surprised by expensive dental work.
In the Alternative Universe, these things are mythical problems. You don’t put off dental checkups. A job, if you have one, is largely just something to fill in your day; if you’re wealthy enough, and lose your job, your wealth ensures you are well-connected to get another (when you’re ready), or you just take a break for a bit.
So, what people with wealth have is a different definition of ‘certainties’ than the rest of us: They think of a certainty as a thing that is planned for, while the rest of us think of a certainty as a thing we can’t avoid.
As a simple example, if you have time to read my long newsletters, chances are you’ve got some kind of will1. You’ve made some plans—your favourite child gets the family house, and your least-favourite gets the rusty old Holden Commodore in the shed etc. When you eventually die, your will comes out and lawyers end up taking a chunk, the tax department might take a bunch more, and you’ve got funeral costs and agency fees and old debts, and your kids just get “whatever is left”.
For the wealthy, accountants, lobbyists and money managers are a small price to pay for the certainty of knowing exactly what will be left. The cost is relatively nothing, to leverage every loophole and trick possible. They can stash wealth in off-shore ‘freeports’, and in “unrealised” property gain. They have family trusts and ongoing businesses and intellectual property residuals. They can walk around with easily-pocketable $100,000 jewellery, to be handed to a kid from their deathbed. They use their wealth to plan for the certainty of taxes all their lives, and will certainly have a plan for it at their death.
The point being, if you can afford to dodge and duck through gaps and holes in tax regulation, you are not a victim of certainty, but a master of it.
And, it goes without saying—although the details are outside the scope of this series—planning for physical death is just as high on the priority list for the ultra-rich as planning for taxes. Publicly-funded organisations might work on ‘healthcare’, but wealth-funded organisations work on ‘life extension’. If (or when) we can reverse or slow aging, wealth is the certainty that those technologies won’t be first (if ever!) leveraged by minimum-wage retail workers.
In simple terms, when something appears certain it leaves a person with either the sense of acquiescence or defiance. How that person is able to respond is largely down to the choices they have. And the Alternative Universe is a veritable Las Vegas buffet.
“Money talks”
You’ll be unsurprised to hear me say wealth can be influential. The thing is, in the Alternative Universe it’s not nearly as literal as those of us in the normal world think it is. Sure, some property developer might throw what sounds like an astonishingly large donation at a presidential campaign, on the pretence of getting some subsidy or tax cut, but the results are not proportional.
You have no doubt heard stories where a $50k donation is turned into a new law or regulation that directly delivered a $50m subsidy or tax break back to the donor. If money simply talked, in the way it does when you slip a restaurant maître d' $10 for the seat by the window, then that $50k donation might result in a $70k-100k return on investment… But, the reality is, it’s not the money that is talking but the wealth behind the money.
It’s the difference between putting in a nail with a cut-down pool noodle, or a sledgehammer—the physical size of the surface touching the nailhead is similar, but the weight behind it is vastly different.
This is precisely the sort of thing that is counterintuitive for the 95% of people for whom money is a means of actualisation, but entirely obvious in the Alternative Universe. So much so, that people with wealth don’t really even think about the hammer they are wielding. It’s why you can watch something like Below Deck and not be especially surprised when some unfathomably-rich-shithead completely demeans another human being for simply not filling their water glass enough…Frankly, it’s why it took hundreds of years for the idea to catch on that other human beings shouldn’t be literal slaves!
Outside the Alternative Universe, we tut-tut about this sort of thing and call it “entitlement”. But it’s actually leverage. We concentrate on the few square centimetres of rubber that are actually sitting on our foot, rather than the building-sized Humvee that little square of tire rubber is attached to the bottom of.
It should go without saying that we should accept no amount of money in return for evil or inhumane behaviour, yet we do all the time—socially and legally. There’s a well-known truism along the lines that “if the punishment for a crime is a fine, then it is a law only for the poor”. This is exactly the sort of disproportionality that the weight of great wealth fortifies.
So, what wealth does is dramatically unbalance the things that hold our society in check. Not because wealthy people have more to spend in equitable, ‘user pays’ ways, but because money behaves in very different ways when it is talking in the shadow of billions more dollars.
“Time is money”
You might already have noticed that a lot of how wealth operates in the Alternative Universe is in allowing its possessors to take a step back from the tribulations of real life. This is nicely demonstrated in the idiom ‘time is money’.
For most of us, this phrase is used to demand your time be respected as worth something: If you’re impatiently waiting, you might complain about how “time is money” in order to emphasise you could, personally, be doing something more valuable with it.
In the Alternative Universe however, it can be basically summarised as “wealthy people don’t queue”.
Think about washing your clothes:
If you’re destitute, you might find a local public bathroom or shelter to occasionally wash.
If you’re poor, you travel to and wait at, the local laundromat
If you’re middle-class you have a convenient washing machine at home
If you’re wealthy, this is someone else’s problem.
The point here is, each of those is progressively less of a time burden, for people who progressively need less. In capitalism, time is always money in the sense that there might be more valuable things to do with it. But the contradiction is wealth buys you time, regardless of whether you have anything valuable to do with it.
We have this penchant for assuming someone with an impressive net worth must be busy, with each second of their 14-hour workday scheduled. But this is just because, in our universe, you have to earn that beach holiday, or time with our grandkids, or that 2-hour nap in the weekend sun.
As I’ve constantly pointed out, a huge portion of wealth comes from things like luck, lobbying, inheritance, being an asshole, dodging taxes, and momentum. The ultra-wealthy possess money worth something to us, but their time is far less directly valuable than a teacher’s, or nurse’s, or garbage collector’s simply because they have much more of it.
Of course, while some wealthy people do work hard, many don’t. Their time is not our definition of money, because wealth lets them use it for themselves: Golfing and pool parties and shopping and feel-good charity events. Or building businesses or smartphone apps, or whatever they want from their life. Once you have enough—once your wealth alone is funding your life choices—your time is actually worth increasingly little, because you have plenty of it: You can choose to make or clean-up your own meals, or drive yourself, or wait in airport queues, or do your accounts, or care for your children.
In the Alternative Universe the amount of money you have is inversely proportional to the value of your time.
We struggle with this as a society, largely because the idea that you can contribute valuable things and valuable time to the world without money is overshadowed by the ostentatious spending of money. Who is being served if I donate a few hours of my time to a foodbank; vs. if I donate $1000 plus a pointless ribbon-cutting ceremony, PR, and celebratory T-shirts to a foodbank? We already know plenty of money is spent wasting people’s time.
There are exceptions of course. A wealthy person donating their time or experience to draw attention to some important cause, in a way that attracts other wealthy or influential people to the cause, is doing good… I appear to have enough ‘wealth-generated’ time in my life to write about causes that (I think) are important.
But, this is complex, right? Because then it gets wrapped up in meritocratic ideas about wealthy people. Wealthy people don’t organically have more insight or knowledge; they just can afford the kinds of education and advisors and mistakes that their concentrated wealth has monopolised away from the rest of us. Sans their billions of dollars and the time their wealth gives them to opine, how much of our time would we willingly give to hear wealthy people’s opinions?2
And so, we arrive back at “time is money”: Your time for their money.
That’s enough for today. We’ll drop you back at the motel, where you can make yourself a cloudy cup of tea with UHT milk and the (underfunded) town water-supply water. The tour bus will be waiting in the carpark, three-sleeps from now, for another little sightseeing trip into the Alternative Universe of Wealth. See you there!
If you don’t have a will, you have my permission to skip this one and go write one up now, to save the people you love a lot of stress and frustration down the line… You won’t miss too much—I’ll catch you up on the salient points later, don’t worry!
>>Donald Trump has entered the chat…