The rich are different

Excellent article in the Guardian today shows how a sense of social responsibility amongst the rich has gone.  We saw a sense of honor in which economic elites served in the military during the World Wars.  Now, the military is disproportionately people of lower income strata.  We got universities and libraries from the Rockefellers and the Carnegies.   Now, we get self-serving academic "institutes" from the Brothers Koch that are intended to reinforce their political views.

The military is only one example of how disconnected wealthy Americans are from their country. The extraordinarily low rate of charitable giving among the rich offers more evidence. Even though we live in a time of entrenched income inequality, poor Americans actually give a higher percentage of their income to charity than the rich do. .... 

The selfish worldview of America’s upper classes is underscored by their demand for ever greater financial rewards. In the last 50 years, CEO compensation rateshave soared. For example, in 1965 the typical CEO made about 20 times as much as average workers. By 2013, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio grew to nearly 300 to 1. 

.... 

Despite their soaring share of the nation’s wealth, the rich go to enormous lengths to avoid paying taxes. A recent study found that wealthy Americans have moved $36bn into offshore tax havens. 

The rich have also poured money into the campaigns of candidates who cut the government programs that most benefit middle-class and working-class Americans, such as public schools and healthcare. And the wealthy increasingly cluster in neighborhoods that isolate them from other social classes. 

History shows it does not have to be this way.

How do we re-connect the wealthy with the rest of us?  Well, if people are making that much money, they are living in a cocoon.  For example, I was walking along the waterfront a few weeks ago and totally awed by the Super-yachts, one with the helicopter on the back.  They were docked apart from the other pleasure boats, sea going vessels that looked lean and mean and fast, and anonymous, like the big black limos that snake around big cities.

Us vs them indeed.

On empathy and community

There's a neat article from NPR, discussing different research studies that come to the same conclusion:  as people become wealthier, they become less generous.  And part of this is that they become disconnected from community.  They become hoarders of gold, selfish, and individualized.

This is not new.  Indeed, the more wealthy you are, the more likely you are to behave unethically.  And yes, some of those Wall Street tycoons really ARE psychopath

Do you remember during the election when Mitt Romney was nailed for his disdain towards the 47%?  We talked about that here.  And about the disdain of the Tea Folk for the poor.  Once you see people as "them", rather than "us", that's inevitable.

And it is certainly not Christian.  Whose foodstamps would Jesus cut?

The Rich Really ARE Different

Ten percent of Wall Streeters may be clinical psychopaths, lacking empathy or compassion for others.

William  Deresiewicz writes  in the NY Times

The only thing that puzzles me about these claims is that anyone would find them surprising. Wall Street is capitalism in its purest form, and capitalism is predicated on bad behavior. This should hardly be news. …. 

Capitalist values are antithetical to Christian ones. (How the loudest Christians in our public life can also be the most bellicose proponents of an unbridled free market is a matter for their own consciences.) Capitalist values are also antithetical to democratic ones. Like Christian ethics, the principles of republican government require us to consider the interests of others. Capitalism, which entails the single-minded pursuit of profit, would have us believe that it’s every man for himself.….

But it's not just Wall Street.  It's people of wealth generally.  From a recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, a meta-analysis of behavioral studies correlated with wealth and social class

Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals.  

Now does this mean that every rich person is a disdainful snob?  Of course not.  It's a trend, not an absolute. But why does it happen?  Daisy Grewal in the HuffPo

But why would wealth and status decrease our feelings of compassion for others? After all, it seems more likely that having few resources would lead to selfishness. Piff and his colleagues suspect that the answer may have something to do with how wealth and abundance give us a sense of freedom and independence from others. The less we have to rely on others, the less we may care about their feelings. This leads us towards being more self-focused. Another reason has to do with our attitudes towards greed. Like Gordon Gekko, upper-class people may be more likely to endorse the idea that “greed is good.” Piff and his colleagues found that wealthier people are more likely to agree with statements that greed is justified, beneficial, and morally defensible. These attitudes ended up predicting participants’ likelihood of engaging in unethical behavior.

So it's worth remembering that members of Congress are disproportionately wealthy, 
and their hold on power depends on having super-wealthy people give them money.   It's little wonder that so many of them have no interest, really, in the realities that affect the rest of us. We aren't really their constituents.