In Fessie’s “Know any Hard-Core Criminals?” thread, Little Nemo says:
The rich are different? Well, stands to reason. The rich are rich, and most of us aren’t. You’d think that would entail some differences. Other than the monetary ones, what are they? What is the general mindset of the rich person, and how does it differ from Joe Blow?
I realize they’re are books out there such as “The Millionaire Mind”, and “How the Rich Think”, and I’m thinking about picking one of the two up. But I’m curious about getting some SDMB feedback.
Of course they’re different - they have more money!
When you can afford to not worry about certain things, you take them for granted. Eventually, you come to expect those things as necessities.
I own a cell phone, a computer with high-speed internet. When I get some time, I plan to buy an iPod and maybe a HDTV of some kind. Provided I am working, I think nothing of dropping $150 for dinner or a night out. I don’t worry about food, rent or clothes. I have generally come to expect that being able to maintain such a lifestyle is “normal”, even though I realize there are many people who can’t afford to do so. So imagine a rich person who comes to expect owning a $2M home and having servents clean up after you is “normal”. They can no more seriously imagine themselves cleaning their house any more than I can imagine working as a ditch digger.
Of course this differs from your windfall rich types, in which these types will end up more broke then rich in the long run. The ones that have created their wealth don’t buy things they don’t need, and don’t carry debt.
From F. Scott Fitzgerald: “the rich are like you and me…only they have more money”! Seriously, a lot of rich people live modestly…they don’t have a lot of worries, and they have no need to show off.
I used to have a couple of rich friends, mainly one. She was REALLY rich, and she just didn’t think about things. It was nothing for her to, for instance, throw a party for her bridal attendants in Las Vegas, which she did by chartering a plane to get us all there and performing some magic by which we all got a certain amount to gamble away.
She, like most of her friends, was free to pursue various careers and to try them out without the necessity of making a living. At the time of her wedding one of her friends owned a clothing boutique and another one was part-owner of an art gallery. Both their endeavors were financed by family money and while they were both fiscally successful, it was in no way a credit to any hard work, except for the hard work of the previous generation that earned the money in the first place.
My friend could not understand why I couldn’t take off a week here and a week there to go to some health spa, or to her condo in Cabo, or to Ireland to see a few horse races. After all, she was willing to pay all my expenses. She just didn’t get that, first of all I was uncomfortable knowing I would never be able to reciprocate, second of all I felt a little bought, and third I had only so much vacation time and then if I took off work–I’d lose my job! I mean she understood this intellectually, she had to, but she really just thought I must not want to be around her. (I did go to Vegas, though.)
Also, she thought she spent very modestly. The $700 Burberry scarf was, after all, a classic and something she would have for 20 years.
I think one issue that makes this a difficult question to answer is that “rich” is a relative concept depending on the neighborhood and social circle you are comparing yourself to. Most of us who are reading this probably don’t think of ourselves as rich.
To our own view, we’re just living a “normal” lifestyle. However, if you can afford access to a computer and the internet you’re doing much better than most of the world’s population.
I won’t deny that having more than enough money can’t change people’s way of interacting with the world. And if we’re talking about silly rich kids, then the wowza factor can be impressive.
But as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s quote points out, that’s not really all that non-intuitive. Lots of middle class or poor people have stupid kids who also have a pretty impressive “wowza factor”, just there are fewer people nodding along to the stupid things they say, since the topic might often be limitted to their parents income.
And of course, for a lot of “rich kids” it’s not actually valid to say that they’re “rich”. Lots of kids with wealthy parents get a good upbringing, good education, and then the boot at 18. So while there certainly are Paris Hiltons among the wealthy, there are also people like my brother and I where we’re working normal jobs, paying rent, and cooking our own cup-o-noodle.
But the main point is that if you give a person a lot of money, it just gives them a chance to be as stupid, intelligent, or creative as they actually are in a more extravegant manner. That doesn’t make the person “different from the rest of the populace, just as a criminal is”, since they don’t suddenly lose their morality or rationality. It just means that anything they do stupid or intelligent is going to come off a lot more extravagant.
And for every one sociopathic CEO or CFO of a corporation, embezzling, there’s hundreds of guys just doing their job to try and keep the company going because doing that is the only guaranteed method to keep at majority of their employees, employed.
So while my parents might equally well be rather silly about inviting you to go to Cabo over the weekend, it makes sense. My dad hated running a company. Trying to keep a thousand people happy, and still getting paid every month is stressful. Now my parents have sold the company, and would much rather be silly and play golf for the rest of their lives. So while it is rather silly of them to extend silly invitations, what can I say, it’s probably lonely for them to be the only two people of our family who are always free.
Well that’s the difference. Rich people have the option of beibg “silly” or selling the company when it gets too stressful. Regular folk still have to go to work.
That’s how I always defined “rich”. If you don’t have to go to work and money you have generates income to live off of comfortably, you’re money. A lot of people think folks making $150,000+ a year is rich. I don’t think so. People making that money still need to earn that salary to pay rent/mortgage, bills, debts, and maintain their lifestyle of choice. If they quit, they’ll likely lose it after a while and need to get another job to keep what they have and want. If you’re rich, your money makes money for you. Income from working is not necessary. At the very least, rich can be something like 700K in the bank at 6% percent interest. That’s 42k a year for a salary, enough for a lot couples to afford housing and still save some of that income for retirement without “having” to work. Bigger families may need more to be considered rich to make it work without working.
So basically, it’s not what you make, it’s what you keep. People making 200k a year at a job isn’t really impressive nor rich if you’re not saving but consuming. This of course, all IMHO.
No one would take the job if it didn’t pay well enough that you could make up for the stress (or at least, no one who you would want as your boss.) And CEOs can’t just quite and sell the company, nor would they. They’ve got thousands of people depending on them.
In my parents’ case, they sold the company not to get rid of it, but because they thought it was a good sell that would be good for the company. Just, as it ended up, the company that bought us ended up trashing it all. My parents stayed trying to keep things sane as long as they could and be chearleaders for the company that bought us out, but eventually it just became obvious that staying would just mean a lot slower and painful heartbreak to watch it all be destroyed.
But still, just knowing such was a possibility, they made it part of the sales agreement that all employees would get really generous severance packages if they were laid off by the new company. So while it was emotional wrecking, I don’t think anyone at our company ended up for the worst.
I’m sorry, this is just completely and utterly wrong and contrary to fact. CEOs sell companies all the time. People get dumped from their jobs as a result of buyouts in massive numbers constantly. It’s a normal part of doing business in America. Anybody who listens to business news will hear tales of woe about thus and such company laying off x thousands of people after a buyout. In fact, one of the common ploys of business is to buy out a competitor and then shut them down, laying off all or most of their employees in the process. It’s just business, baby.
Here’s my take on the rich – I agree that they consist of that class of people whose income comes from owning things rather than working. They’re no different from us as human beings, they just have different concerns because of their different source of income. However, those concerns pits their interests directly against the rest of us.
The rich are mainly concerned with preserving and maximizing their income. That’s why they care about taxes to such a huge extent, and also why they are so interested in the stock market and other vehicles for maximizing thier wealth.
Now, one way of maximizing your income is to get more for less. If you own stock in a corporation, this means what? Making as much money as you can while spending as little as you must. So the less you pay your workers, and the more work you get out of them, the better off you are. Whether the people who work for you are miserable or happy, living like slaves or living like kings is of no concern … what matters as far as your lifestyle is concerned is, how much work are you getting out of them, and how little do you have to pay for it.
Marx was right about some things, and this is one of them.
In my various jobs I met a few people who were exceedingly successful at what they did, and thus had earned some wealth.
I really thought there was an energy difference between them and The Rest of Us. They vibrated on a higher frequency, were more intense and focused, less distracted. Not sure if that’s a gift in the way athletes and artists are gifted, or if it’s a product of upbringing. Maybe they weren’t burdened by shame, the way so many people are.
I won’t deny that there are people who think this way, but there are also those who are smart enough to realize that happier workers are more productive. You can interpret the news of buyouts and layoffs as signs that it happens all the time, or as signs that it’s rare enough to be newsworthy. Without hard numbers, it’s awfully difficult to prove which interpretation is right.
Anyway, there are a couple good books on the rich that do support Little Nemo’s thesis. The first is Nelson Aldrich’s Old Money, an insider’s take on the society and history of America’s de facto hereditary aristocracy (which lasted from about 1870-1960). The second is David Brooks’ Bobos In Paradise, a more lifestyle-oriented treatise on the modern rich, who’ve really come into power over the past 20-25 years. It’s difficult to read these and come away with the impression that the only difference between the rich and non-rich is financial.
In the U.K the rich tend to send their kids away to boarding school where the conditions are grim and there are no personal servants and then they go on to University where they live the traditional student lifestyle of the "fend for yourself slob mode " so by the time they get to actually live in their $2m home they do appreciate the home comforts of the wealthy.
I didn’t say people don’t sell their companies. I said people don’t just get bored and say, “Okay, I’m bored now! Buy my company please, someone!”
Of all the people my parent’s know, even in parting, there’s one guy who has a big thing against taxes. He’s the guy who came up with the idea of “Duty Free” stores in airports, and sells cigarettes to the masses of people who don’t want to pay taxes.
(Of course, he now can’t enter the US since he’s since refused to pay his.)
So that’s one guy out of hundreds. And indeed, while it is economically and politically infeasible to tax everyone equally in a representative democracy, it really isn’t fair to do so. Wealthy people didn’t do anything bad in the world except come up with the better mousetrap, and for that they get to be punished for it. And where do you think wealthy people’s money goes? That they bury it, or that Bill Gates spends $8000 every day just to break even? No, they get called up every day to listen to people trying to start new businesses and invest in them. I.e. new jobs.
Trickle down may not be the end all and be all of economic planning, and certainly it needs safeguards–as does anything–but it also isn’t a big lie. Outside of spending money back into expanding the economy, wealthy people just can’t spend as much money as they get, so there’s no help for it.
?
Bill Gates makes several thousand dollars a day (including stocks and such.) For him to maximize his income accomplishes very little. Going hungry just isn’t a worry. Adding a few extra billion dollars net worth is meaningless.
Corporations lay people off, give people raises, ask them to work overtime in an effort to maximize the stability of the company so they can continue growth. Growth is required by the populace because they invest in the company and expect something back from that. It’s not the ideal system, but in the current world the only way to continue a company is to work to expand it and there’s not a lot that anyone can do about that until someone comes up with a better system (and Communism ain’t it.)
Ya.
No. Marx was living in an age where the switch to free-market capitalism had just begun, and when things were still based on a class system in the business world. To be certain there’s mean and uncaring CEOs in the world, but that I have ever been able to tell by meeting a random sample of hundreds of CEOs, the number of a-holes to nice guys is the same or possibly better than you would get at lower income brackets.
Saying that you hear what “companies do” on the news would be like saying that all rockstars are drugged out idiots who get married and divorced every other week since you hear that on the news as well. Certainly lots of bad stuff happens in the world, but still 99% of the time everything is going on happy as can be. But only the 1% makes it in the news.
I don’t know about that. I have some friends of friends who don’t hold real jobs. They mooch, they play in bands, they string together marginal incomes holding part time jobs. They do the Renaissance Festival circuit passing hat and living out of their car and a tent. They live off girlfriends or boyfriends, student loans they will never pay off.
What they don’t do is go to Cabo.
I think the poor and rich have similar options dropping out of the mainstream rat race (and I’m willing to bet Sage Rat’s parents spend as much time managing their money as some of my friends spend working) - they just don’t have similar lifestyles when they choose to be silly.
Conditions at UK boarding schools have improved immeasurably over the past 40 years or so. There’s one a couple of miles from here which looks like a luxury hotel. Inside as well as outside. And that’s by no means the only example I could give.
The ‘traditional student lifestyle’ of wealthy undergraduates is funded by their parents.
You didn’t say so, but are you inferring that this is a bad thing? D you think the owners of large corporations should be more concerned about the welfare of their workers than their workers are for his? How would you do it differently?
