What about the poor rich people?
Examining how wealth should make us feel.
Growing up, we went to a local Anglican church, although, not for especially long: For various reasons I was barely old enough for Holy Communion before we became a Church@Christmas family and then a #NoChurch family.
I toyed with religion, via friends, right through until my late teens, but my foundational knowledge of the Bible remains the stories-told and colouring-books-coloured of Sunday School.
Frankly, there’s some bananas stuff in the ‘good book’, especially in the Old Testament: I distinctly recall learning at school about how whales eat 4cm-long krill, by filtering out any bigger creatures through a tight comb of teeth. And then being super-confused by the story of Jonah getting swallowed whole by a whale1
Even in the New Testament, there’s apparently enough craziness to have justified centuries of discussion and, to this day, millions of person-hours every week, hashing-out “what it all means”.
A good example is a parable that always stuck with me—that of The Lost Son.
Jesus told these little stories called Parables to his followers; because our squishy brains settle into a good story much more than charts and academic papers. And, lucky for us, the thing Our-Man-Luke thought was 15th-most-important about Jesus’s life was the retelling of three of those little parables, purportedly about forgiveness:
The three parables re-told in Luke 15 concern things that were lost and then found: One sheep from a flock of 100; one coin from a fortune of ten; and one prodigal (meaning: wasteful) son, contrasted with a diligent son.
The moral of each of these stories is we should enthusiastically celebrate a thing that once was lost, and now is found—even if they appear to, proportionally, return little to the total.
(…and ‘Amazing Grace; is in your head for the rest of the day now…)
Coins and sheep don’t really have feelings we can (yet) appreciate, so the celebrations for the found sheep and coin seem a little over-the-top, but otherwise harmless. The story of the prodigal son, however, involves a farmer splitting his inheritance between two sons: One who then stayed to care for his father and work the land; and the other who blew his inheritance on gambling and good times. But then, the wayward son’s dejected return is startlingly celebrated by the father, with attention far beyond anything the diligent son had ever received for his efforts.
Obviously, the moral of the Prodigal Son parable is supposed to be something like:
“Don’t be a jealous, whiney little baby if you’re already on the virtuous path.”
But also
“We should forgive, and enthusiastically welcome back, anyone who had strayed from the virtuous path into sin, because the important thing is—eventually—they sorted their shit out and did the right thing”
And there is my conflict.
I’m actually on-board with forgiveness. And I’m also really on-board with not prejudicing the behaviour of a person, because you never really know what’s going on for them. But I have a real ‘It Depends’ attitude to a story like this, because of how it seems to reflect the way we treat the wealthy in society.
And, yes, we’re still talking about wealth. Catch up here if you like.
In today’s newsletter I want to talk about why we accept wealth. Not why we accept or incentivise success, because we can do that in ways that don’t need to damage other people’s life prospects. But why we are no-revolution-required-today!-level ok with one individual being ‘valued’ [sic] at 100,000x more than an average another person; even in a rich, developed country?
I think, just quietly, this confuses us all a bit. We’re going to try and work through it together in this series.
If you evenly-space a population on a wealth chart, you’ll notice there are dramatically more people who are ‘not wealthy’ than who ‘are wealthy’ in our societies. It’s trendy now to point out how minorities groups are disproportionately poor. But consider, the population as-a-whole is way more disproportionately poor, if you consider the relative wealth of the 0.1% ultra-rich.
Of course, guys like Marx (Karl, not Richard), had this whole “class consciousness” thing pretty pinned down 150 years ago, so I’m not telling you anything you didn’t already know. However, the wealthy throughout history have proven themselves very adept at yelling “Quick! Look over there!”, and pointing instead at someone who looks different, to distract us from the sameness of our actual experience.
I’m not saying that all wealthy people are bad—I think we could do better with how we identify and reward ‘greatness’ in the world, but I’m also not saying we shouldn’t reward people who offer an outsized contribution to the world. I just want to put some thought into why we allow such excessive wealth.
And I think it’s got a lot to do with optimism. Because let’s be frank, if there’s one thing that humans are, it’s optimistic.
This is an aside, but there’s probably not as many things that separate us from our animal brothers and sisters as you might assume. We understand that animals, to varying degrees, suffer and love and get hungry and angry and fearful. And they breathe and use tools and reproduce and map their surroundings. What they don’t do is think years into the future. They don’t ask ‘why’ something is or was, and set about understanding it or changing it. That unique human attribute is what I like to call fundamental optimism.
I wrote a whole separate piece on this, so I’m not going into it here, but the key thing to understand is that humans are born with minds that reach for the future.
We all understand the power of money. Even if we have enough of it now, we intuitively understand how hard our lives would be if the world went on, and we were suddenly excluded from it by a lack of money. And, because we are both naturally optimistic, and conditioned to understand the value of money, we carry around this idea that wealth is beneficial to us all.
And so, with that ideological distraction underway, we arrive at money’s next magic trick.
What foundational optimism is, is a natural sentience to possibilities. We see the potential for good from wealth—for us personally and, via philanthropy, for others—so, on-balance, we have faith in the possibilities of wealth.
That explains the endurance of ideas like trickle-down economics.
…It explains why we are politically-resistant to taxes, even if they are only intended for people who earn miles more than we’ll ever realistically earn.
…It explains why we keep describing evil conmen2 as ‘value creators’, defending their stupidity, and swooning when they pull up in ridiculously-uncomfortable-and-impractical cars to ridiculously-expensive-and-pointless galas.
…And, it explains our plaque-heavy celebrations where crumbs are thrown by wealthy people—who really only care about fabricating their name into perpetuity; across the entranceways of university libraries and charitable foundations.
We know that having wealth doesn’t mean you’re a unique genius. It’s a lot of luck and a fair bit of being prepared to be an asshole at times. Sure, some wealthy people are pretty cool. Some wealthy people even work really hard; but none work 6000x harder than Mrs Green, your amazing primary school teacher who retired, exhausted, with meagre savings, then died of pneumonia in a mouldy council flat a few years ago...
What we seem to do with wealth is treat it like the prodigal son.
I don’t want to offend one-third of the population by directly conflating wealth or poverty with faith or virtue (although, you know, Jesus kind-of did3). I do want you to think about how we allow wealth to do all sorts of garbage stuff; and treat the rest of us like shit simply for wanting to live moral and empathetic lives.
And then, we welcome it back with newspaper headlines and pats-on-the-back when it does the bare minimum.
We seem to have internalised this insane idea that wealth operates as a kind of personified altruism: Just the mere existence of wealth, is enough to drive innovation, create jobs, be charitable, and fund our tax base.
But, if you just pay even a teensy-bit of attention to reality, you’ll notice that substantial wealth is far more incentivised to stifle innovation, trim back on labour costs, and reduce taxes via everything from charitable giving to avoidance.
We’ll all agree about the crooked shit that massive wealth allows people to impose on the rest of us. And then, in the very next breath, we’ll laugh at how impractical and self-defeating a slogan like There Should Be No Such Thing as a Billionaire is…
“Hilarious! That wacky naïve hipster shit! Where do they think the jobs will come from?!?”
Jesus had his own issues to deal with. He didn’t have to deal with the complexity of ‘value’ concealed in the status of social media followings, and so on. But he did understand value. What I think he buried into the Parable of the Lost Son was an important subtlety that tends to get missed in our rush to use it to celebrate forgiveness and the ‘return to virtue’.
If you think about it, what was returned—the single coin; the single sheep; the prodigal son—was worth relatively little in the scheme of things. What is therefore being celebrated was not the single coin or the sheep, or even the son, but the restoration of their respective value in the wider context:
One coin, alone on a table, is worth everything to an observer.
One-coin-among-10 on a table would barely be noticed.
It was not the prodigal son’s return that was being celebrated, but the restoration of his little part of the family. That, in relative terms, was a downgrade for him.
We assign a lot of value to wealth in our society, in large part because of the exceptional things we believe it can do. And, the result is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, where we all gather around and lift it up above our heads while exclaiming “Look at how high it is! Look at how it floats above us!”
Even as it kicks our arse, we keep straining to hold it up, in the optimistic hope that it will, one day, turn and smile down on us.
But wealth is a shared commodity—built out of knowledge stacked-up, and effort exerted over millennia.
When the sheep came back, he gets bundled up with the rest of the flock—not sprinkled with glitter and given a beanbag to lie in for the rest of his days...
When that coin was found, it will be dropped back into the little coin purse with the other nine to be spent, not put on a shelf to be pointlessly admired…
We don’t get the rest of the story of the prodigal son but, presumably, he went on to work the land as an equal—that is, 1/3rd of what he was when he was lost—alongside his brother and father.
When our collected-wealth is lost to individuals, and then some of it finds its way back to us—as philanthropy, or investment, or jobs, or Marvel® Avengers™ movies—the lesson it should teach us is about where wealth belongs.
We shouldn’t be celebrating the piddly bits of it that find their way back to us, but constantly reminding ourselves that it is both only a big deal because we keep it separated from us and, as long as we continue to do that, we remain incomplete.
Speaking of wealth not being with us, I want to address the debate about wealth taxes scaring wealthy people away. Next time…
-T
In Sunday School, it was definitely “Jonah and the whale”, although now the apparent preferred translation is ‘great fish’ which…well, you know; a whale is technically a marine mammal. Also, not all whales eat krill. But even big fish don’t generally have big throats so the whole thing is just...Argh, fuck it, it’s completely irrelevant to my newsletter today anyway so let’s move on!
Let’s be honest. They’re mostly men.
“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth” - Matthew 5:5