Le Nouveau Riche n’Oblige Pas
by David Atkins
I must confess that I haven’t read or even looked at Chris Hayes’ new book yet, so I may be shortchanging or mischaracterizing his argument. If so, I’ll be back with some copious meae culpae. But from my brief perusal of his own interviews and the reviews, it would seem that Hayes’ thesis complements something that I’ve been thinking for a while ever since reading this article in the Atlantic about plutocracy, but haven’t written much about for fear of needing to explain my position with too many caveats or for fear of being taken out of context. The idea is the disturbing notion that the breaking down of blue blood rigidity, and the comparative ease of the rise of a new global class of nouveau riche may have the horrible unintended consequence of an even more out-of-touch and entitled group of individuals than the blue bloods they replaced.
This is not to say that old school plutocrats are angels by any stretch of the imagination, or that there aren’t some fine liberal philanthropists to be found among the new rich. But at least with blue bloods, most people (including, even at a base subconscious level, among the blue bloods themselves) understood that they hadn’t actually earned their wealth. Inherited wealth came with noblesse oblige, the notion that those born into privilege were obligated share the wealth. It was understood by a significant section of society at least since the Great Depression if not before that wealth begat more wealth, that social mobility was limited, and that the wealthy were obligated to the rest of the nation to ensure that the social order was generally kept.
The few new rich who won the lottery of the IPO economy, by contrast, feel that they earned that money, dammit (regardless of how many of their similarly talented fellow entrepreneurs didn’t quite hit the jackpot for one reason or another), and that they don’t owe anyone else a damn thing. Add to this the fact that a high proportion of those who are most successful in rising to the top of the business ladder tend to be sociopaths or have sociopathic tendencies, and we have the perfect recipe for an Ayn Rand renaissance, and a society with less compassion than seen in Rockefeller’s day.
Let me put it another way: I think you’d have an easier time trying to convince Paris Hilton of the need for her to pay a higher tax rate, than you would David Koch. Paris Hilton and her ilk would understand at a certain level that her wealth wasn’t exactly something she could morally keep all to herself at the expense of society, while David Koch ironically labors under the illusion that whatever wealth he managed to extract from society was his by right. The economic explosion of the mid-19th century due to the expansion of the West created a similar class of nouveau riche sociopaths, and it took a good 50 years for the country to recover from the collective damage they did.
None of this is to say that economic mobility even at the highest levels is a negative thing, or that we’d necessarily be better off under the thumb of Baron Howard Whittlethorpe the Fourth. But it is to say that of all the classes of people in the world, it may well be that the nouveau riche are among the most to be feared at an organizational and societal level as a general rule, individuals among them to be excepted as usual. For it’s the nouveau riche who tend to be the most entitled and most ruthless of all.
As a matter of public policy, if any part of this thesis has merit it means that societies with major economic mobility at the upper end of the income scales must make all the more certain to have economic protections in place for the poor and middle class, because the nouveau riche are potentially even likelier to attempt to predate on them and resent their less fortunate fellows than are the generationally wealthy.
Update: A number have written, correctly, to inform me that the Koch brothers did inherit millions. Still, read the whole Atlantic article to get a sense of the attitudes of so many of the self-made rich…
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