I just concluded my semi-annual re-viewing of Breaking Bad, all five seasons, and got a little insight into the psychology of rich people when Walter White dismisses a 5 million dollar payoff as peanuts when, as is pointed out, he very clearly declared his ultimate goal in the drug business in the earlier episodes as a mere $737,000. In other words, it makes perfect sense to rich people to reject their own goals as insane, which to me makes them a little insane. We can explain their change of mind, and rationalize it, but it’s really little else but greed, plain and simple. Lust for money takes over, and one’s original goals and aims and dreams and hopes get rationalized.
To me that sounds similar to Wall Street when Gordon Gekko is telling Bud Fox his backstory and how at the time he thought his first real estate deal (a few 100k or $1M or whatever) was all the money in the world and how it’s a day’s pay.
Similarly there is a scene in Succession where one character is explaining to another how $5 million sucks. You’re kind of rich and can buy a few nice things, but it’s not really enough money to do anything serious with.
As you gain more wealth you quickly learn how much it buys and how much it does not. Things that were once luxuries or mere fantasy become a necessity. More so than “stuff” is the ability to wield power and influence. To be able to use your money to make things happen.
I, in discussions of this type, point out Pamela Harriman. She made her way in life through numerous rich men, she ran through all of Leland Hayward’s money, and she ran through most of Averell Harriman’s money before he died. She wanted the billionaire lifestyle and she only had millionaire income.
Greed is good.
It really isn’t–it’s the problem we’re discussing, and “good” is a moral value, not an economic one. Greed is immoral, but there’s no law against it, so we turn it into a moral virtue. That is seriously screwed up.
$5m net is about where we’re at. I’m semi-retired at 55 which is probably the biggest thing. I’m also quite arthritic, so it’s a good thing I don’t have to work. We know we’re kind of wealthy, and appreciate it, but we don’t do anything earth-shattering with it, and it feels like it could be gone in an instant. We used to travel a fair amount, but the carbon footprint started to bug us (turns out tropical Scuba diving has a vastly larger footprint than heli-skiing in BC). I feel a lot less entitled than I did when I was younger.
Nah. It would make complete sense. The monkey wants their children, mate(s), and close kin to survive, and is more than well served if the competition is weaker, or even dead.
Really that, and the fact that wealth is ultimately power (and the reverse), is it.
I will very likely keep working long after I could reasonably comfortably retire. For me that is not about power or money as the score, but it is about continuing to get the “hit” of doing something that I feel I am good at. These folk are good at making money. That’s their hit. Plus all things, including wealth, are relative. “Rich” in this sense is not defined by having enough to have your basic needs met, or even to support a specific lifestyle, but your score compared to those that you consider your peers, even if your peers are limited to only a very few in the whole world. The goalpost always moves.
I’m really not seeing what the problem is with a company having a goal to have a say… 30% profit margin, and adjusting prices to keep it there.
And anyway, the article mentions, in between nonsensical commentary about how (GASP!) shareholders are the main beneficiaries of higher profits, and how they could do a bunch of stuff that doesn’t make a lot of sense, how the demand is decreasing due to higher prices.
It’ll shake itself out when demand falls or costs fall- either one will cause prices to decrease. Right now, it’s kind of a perfect storm of normal/high demand and high costs.
Breaking Bad is fiction and simply reflects what the writers thought would be a good story. It is not a source of fact. Additionally, if WW stopped at $737,000 and did not increase his goals the series would have stopped. This is a (the?) key driver of what the writers wrote about his fictional behaviour.
Deriving your view of the motivation of rich people from dramatic fiction is highly sub-optimal.
Having said that, for someone who has just re-watched the series you seem to me to be missing a major point about it. WW starts out wanting a specific amount money for a specific purpose and no doubt his thinking at the time was that he would get into and get out of the drug business cleanly. But by quite early in the series, he is so enmeshed that he has no prospect of returning to normal law-abiding life.
For his goals to consequently change does not imply any insanity or the motivations you assume.
That fictional path though is not necessarily off base for some people’s realities.
At first he is doing it for money with money to provide for a real need, to pay for medical care and to provide for his survivors.
But he still became hooked on the validation of the money, pride in the quality of the his “product”, and the power, of being the one who knocks.
Money became not what he could do with it, not to support a lifestyle, but a token, more to himself than to anyone else, of his being of power, a winner.
And that I think applies to the subject of the OP.
The people really getting screwed by this don’t have investments. Here is a study from the SEC.
82% of those with no accounts had income of less than $50K, versus 45% of those with retirement accounts only being in this category. It’s well known that stock market runups advantage the relatively rich.
That’s why increasing minimum wages help these people a lot more than rising stock prices.
thanks for understanding the value of using a fictional example of a real motivation. That’s the value in fiction, that we can understand the interior workings of a character’s mind (though we still remain exterior to WW’s thinking, technically) as opposed to real life where we always get told “You dont KNOW what [Musk, Trump, Madoff etc.] is thinking”–this example lets us past that barrier to discuss a real issue.
Are you… defending… Walter White?
Indeed he is, in much the same terms that other greedy capitalists are defended, only with less basis for the defense, since we know so much about what WW is thinking, what he says about his own motivations, how he has zero responsibility to stockholders to justify his greedy behavior. I think it’s great that defenders of capitalist greed will include even blatantly criminal (even murderous) fictional capitalists with the same words they use to defend real-life malefactors. There is literally no act of selfishness, lust for money, utterly insane behavior that cannot be rationalized.
One could say he engaged in a lot of monkey business.
Yes, and if I said that I didn’t think Hitler’s behaviour implied he was into fucking tortoises, I’d be defending Hitler.
Sorry, not interested in debating strawmen.
It was a joke, man.
Well OK but insufficiently clear not to have @slicedalone start down an unsupported rant on the assumption you were serious.
I don’t suppose that’s your fault.
Wait, so this entire post is sarcastic? Or just the final sentence (that supports the entire post)? Now I’m confused. Or maybe @Spice_Weasel was being sarcastic about defending WW, somehow? What does that mean? That @Spice_Weasel doesn’t think @Princhester was defending WW in claiming that WW’s shift in rationalizations
?
I think it’s rationalized in that they view the world we live in as inherently cruel, selfish and insane. Their view is the only thing that separates wealthy people from poor people is that the poor people aren’t as smart, hard working, ambitious, or ruthless as the people making the money. And they have all these people with their hands out trying to take what’s theirs - lazy employees who want to get paid to do nothing, entitled family members who did nothing besides being born, competing businesses that are even more ruthless, corrupt politicians, governments trying to steal their wealth with taxes, bleeding heart liberals crying “you’re too rich, give some to the poor!”, criminals looking to just steal from them. So they end up with this view of “I built this great wealth, fuck the rest of you for wanting to take it.”
Most people seem to have a view of if they study hard, do a good job at work, things should work out ok. That makes them good employees, but it also presumes that they are part of a system that is inherently fair. If you believe the system isn’t fair, it makes it easy to justify to break the rules because the rules are only there to protect the people who are already rich.
I’m sympathetic to your take about billionaires. I think they will rationalize virtually any evil to make more money. But I was not really trying to pick on Princhester. I haven’t seen more than three episodes of Breaking Bad so I cannot comment on Walter White’s motivations. I can guess that they probably weren’t all that good.