Sampiro, I think that as it applies to the OP, the fact that Jobs is wealthy is only tangentally (at best) relevant to the anecdote. Jobs may or may not be a prick, but I can’t see that it applies to the discussion here.
My bad. I misread “does she have security issues” with the psychological spin rather than the literal “bodyguards and panic rooms” definition. :smack:
When I was a kid in Minneapolis my family lived next to a woman whose was raised in an extremely wealthy family on the East Coast. She mainly lived an upper middle class life then, by choice, although I remember her asking my mother once (in the '70’s, mind you) if most families could live on a household budget of $10K per month, because she couldn’t managed that and her husband was irritated. My mother assued her that indeed, most families lived on much less than that.
When she was being raised she and her sister were sent to Swiss boarding school. Her brother was sent to a high-class mental institution. They had security precautions when she was young, but her kids didn’t live with security, although they had a state of the art home security system. When her son got into some trouble she thought about institutionalizing him. My mother told her that we’d take him before she’d stick him in a mental institution. She got the kid counselling and he remained at home. Even 15 years later, 12 years after we’d moved away, the son had a picture of our family on his dresser.
StG
FWIW, Eve Jobs is about twelve years old. Thank you for all the replies.
(Who the heck drives her to soccer practice? If her life is pretty normal, I suppose Mom.)
I read somewhere that George Soros has some kind of insane protection over his kids. There’s too much crap on Google to get a decent read, but I do believe that it’s difficult for them to pull off the “Average Joe” thing.
I am not surprised. Apple groupies might be annoying, but GS has people who want him dead.
A few years ago, I read a book called “The Rich and The Super Rich” which is abot precisely the sort of things Paul is curious about. The quote that has stuck in my mind is “After the first million, the lifestyle doesn’t change very much.” There’s a lot of truth there. If you’re in the middle middle class, you can afford a house, a decent car, health insurance, live in a decent neighborhood, work at a decent job, send your kids to a decent school.
Rich people can afford a very nice house, and a very nice new car, health insurance, live in a ver nice neighborhood, send their kids to private schools … I wouldn’t call it all that different a lifestyle. Rich people don’t get extra cable channels, or restaurants just for them (middle class people can eat at the nicest restuarants, just less often) or access to forms of transportation, etc., that middle class people don’t have. A middle class kid very likely has travelled on a jet, has gone on boating trips … just not on a private jet, or on yachts. But there’s no real EXPERIENTIAL gap between middle class kids and rich kids. A rich kid might get a nicer Ipod sooner than a middle class kid, but within a year or so both can have Ipods.
The major difference between the wealthy and the middle class is that wealthy people’s income is rarely tied to a job which can be lost at a moment’s notice (I would argue that anyone of whom this is true is not wealthy). So wealthy people can choose how they use their time on Earth, whereas if you’re lower or middle class, you grow up knowing that you will spend a certain portion of your time on Earth (almost invariably, most of it) doing what some wealthy person, corporation or organization wants you to do.
And that IS a huge difference, but a subtle one for some.
I went to Macalester College, which has a fairly high percentage of very rich students. The niece and nephew of Manuel Noriega, for example. Another classmate was a member of some Middle Eastern royal family.
The thing that struck me about the difference between middle-class kids (like me) and rich kids was that, while there might not have been that much of a qualitative difference between the way our parents lived, the ability of said parents to extend that lifestyle to their kids was sharply different.
Middle-class kids are taking out loans and working in college. Rich kids are not.
Middle-class kids are dealing with bookcases made from bricks and boards. Rich kids are renting furnished apartments.
Middle-class kids are eating Ramen. Rich kids are going out to eat.
These are overgeneralizations, but I think there is a phase shift of sorts in the way you live based on how much money you have.
Which leads me to differ with this:
I think that a year or so and a quality level matters enough to kids that it does make a difference.
I also think that focusing on the obtainable stuff (Ipods, plane rides) overlooks the pervasive effect of money. Having money means that your range of choices increases, or that you don’t have to make choices. And that, in turn, makes for a fundamentally different life experience.
Good point. I don’t think the nicer apartments and eating out are such a big thing, but taking out loans and working are huge burdens that rich kids don’t experience, that would adversely impact a middle class kid’s ability to succeed in college and in later life, beyond the rich kids just generally having a nicer time of it in college.
I am not sure what you mean by this. What sort of difference does it make? Is it a matter of its making a difference to kids, who have, shall we say, immature standards?
Here we are probably in agreement. The key to wealth isn’t bling, it’s freedom to make choices about how you will live. For example, both a middle class kid and a wealthy kid could decide to write poetry and “work” as little as possible after graduating from college. The middle class kid will have to either sponge off his parents or get by however he can, working part-time or temp stuff. The rich kid will get money from his parents so he’ll have a nice apartment, a car, nice clothes, the ability to eat out whenever he likes, etc. He will look like a Good Prospect (all other things being equal) to members of the opposite sex. the middle class poet will look like a bum. Both kids made the same choices, but one suffers terribly for it, the other does not. So in most cases, it’s not a real choice for middle class kids. In the case of poetry, maybe not such a bad thing. But what if the kid wants to work on advanced theoretical physics or work out some new invention or something along those lines. The middle class kid faces endless struggle. The rich kid’s path is paved in gold.
Yes. I am saying it may not make a difference from your perspective, but I think it does to the kid. Which makes me think we agree, unless I am missing your point entirely.
Not Adam?
Eve… Apple… would make a geeky kind of sense.
FWIW, I was sitting with my kids at our local California Pizza Kitchen a few years ago when Bill and Melinda brought their kids in for lunch. They sat at the booth next to us and seemed pretty normal.
We wondered how bit a tip they left. 
This depends on how giving the parents are. I got an education and $30,000 to go towards a house pending the approval of my grandparents. I didn’t get out of school with a guaranteed job nor any promise, implication, nor hope of carrying on my parents’ company (and personally would only do so if I had my own corporation that could acquire it.)
However, such things as not having to pay my way through college is not a small thing, agreed. But then it comes down to what I’m going to do with my free time. And as it happened, in the free time I had I taught myself to program and within five years of graduating from college (literature studies) had saved up enough from my programming job to be able to put my own kid through college.
Some people do take stuff for granted, but just as many others learn from what they experience in life and from watching their parents–like having a work ethic and wanting to succeed and doing something impressive.
Certainly for some rich kids, the future is a guaranteed golden road. But even this doesn’t mean they can’t go off to become civil-rights activists and physicists. To chant the instant-cliche from Spiderman, “With great power comes great responsibility.” The way I always figured it was that not having to waste all that time on “other” stuff just meant that I had no excuse not to go farther than others. But as said, my brother is mostly broke.
So, in sum result, rich people are about the same as non-rich–just with more money. Some good, some bad. Some smart, some dumb. Some a-holes and others saints. Probably some are abusive to their children. Probably some are drunkards and addicts. Some spoil their kids, while others may live in a hut with all their money hidden in a vault somewhere untouched.
Certainly–and most popularly–you could say most of them are annoying blowhards. But for what segment of the population couldn’t you say that?
My main concern here goes back to my discussions with free-market activiists on this board, who seem to believe that the US magically has a level playing field for all because it has a capitalist system. I don’t believe that rich kids are any better or worse than middle class or poor kids as human beings, but they definitely have some advantages WRT things like education and acculturation (i.e., rich kids are more likely to learn from their parents that money is a thing to be managed as well as obtained, whereas with poor kids and to a slightly lesser extent middle class kids, obtaining money tends to be the sole focus of their education about the stuff).
I’ve listened to an excellent seminar put on by a ‘futurist’ that made similar statements, the difference between the haves and have-nots is NOT stuff. The poorest famlies still have a TV, cellphone, walkman, iPod, whatever. When you look at a THING list, it’s all there.
The other thing that has me wondering is: We have more and more McMansions popping up in Denver. We have a Parade of Homes event that generates 5 to 15 $1Million+ houses a year and have done so for 25-30 years. All by itself it’s generated, say, 150 homes worth more than 2 million dollars…and they’re just the obvious ones.
Who are all these people that can afford these homes?
And yet, I see something like a picture of Rio de Janero where the bay is chock full of $20+ million dollar boats and realize that as rich as us 'mericans are, there’s a segment of the population where we don’t even rate on the scale.
That’s being attributed to Spidey these days? I found a source a few years older:
Of course not. But that’s not really on topic (i.e. whether or not rich kids can turn out with normal personalities.)
But even under Communism, I’d rather be the son of Stalin than of some guy in Siberia. An actual even playing field will never exist so long as parents care for their children.
Yeah, but it’s not nearly as catchy.