Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying
by David Atkins
I’m a big fan of the humor site Cracked.com; it’s a great source not only of humor but some really fascinating articles about nature, history and social science. Some of the articles could use a good deal of fact-checking so it’s not an authoritative source, but most of it is accurate and eye opening.
There’s also a lot of political opinion couched as humor, mostly from a progressive point of view. That’s partly because progressive viewpoints are fairly common among the Millennials who make up the site’s primary readership, and partly because good political humor has become almost the sole province of the left given the Right’s implosion into self-parody.
And sometimes, it can be very helpful. One of the problems with talking about income inequality to folks who aren’t politically obsessed is the tendency to become didactic and preachy, angrily showing off a lot of charts and graphs. I’m just as guilty of this as anyone else, if not more so. It’s exactly the sort of stylistic approach that helped cost Al Gore the election in 2000.
Well, David Wong (pseudonym of Jason Pargin) has a great article to show the politically uninvolved why winger arguments about income inequality are wrong, in an easily accessible way. It’s called Six Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying. Some highlights:
Most high-income earners do put in a ton of hours. Bill Gates seemed to never sleep (an employee once said that putting in 81 hours in four days still couldn’t keep up with Gates’ schedule). So yes, it’s unfair that we tend to think that “being rich” means “lounging by the pool while an albino tiger massages our feet with his tongue.” So, “Hey, I work hard for what I have!” is perfectly true. It’s also insulting.
It’s insulting for the exact same reason “Hey, I love my country!” is insulting: It implies that the listener doesn’t. Otherwise there’d be no reason to say it.
It implies a bizarre alternate reality where society rewards you purely based on how much effort you exert, rather than according to how well your specific talents fit in with the needs of the marketplace in the particular era and part of the world in which you were born. It implies that the great investment banker makes 10 times more than a great nurse only because the banker works 10 times as hard.
He doesn’t.
And even stranger, it implies that money earned is a perfect indicator of a person’s value to society — if you’re broke, it must mean you’re a loser who contributes nothing to anyone’s life. And that’s downright bizarre when it comes from the same people who also go on and on about the importance of parenting and family values. Surely they’ve noticed that being a great stay-at-home parent makes you exactly zero dollars a year.
And volunteering to work at a shelter for battered women? Doesn’t pay shit! Diving into a creek to save a toddler from drowning? It pays infinitely less than throwing a touchdown pass during the Super Bowl.
Or this:
I guess our entire philosophy about money kind of revolves around this premise — that there is no poor or working class, but only people who have chosen to not buckle down to the task of getting rich (and thus deserve whatever salary, insecurity or poor work conditions they get). So there should be no talk about improving the lives of the non-rich, since any of them can simply choose to elevate themselves out of that group, right?
Seriously, now. How much time do you really have to spend off your goddamned yacht to see that this isn’t true? You don’t even need to leave the dock — there’s a guy standing right there who you pay to fix your boat’s engine. You know that 1) you absolutely need guys like him and 2) he will never get rich doing what he does. He could be great at his job, he might be the Michael Jordan of mechanics, he might work 100 hours a week — it doesn’t matter. Sure, if that one guy somehow also has the head for management and finance and the networking skills, he could maybe open his own chain of yacht repair shops. But they can’t all do that.
So “anyone can get rich” isn’t just untrue, it’s insultingly untrue. You can’t have a society where everyone is an investment banker. And you can’t have a society where you pay six figures to every good policeman, nurse, firefighter, schoolteacher, carpenter, electrician and all of the other ten thousand professions that civilization needs to survive (and that rich people need in order to stay rich).
It’s like setting a jar of moonshine on the floor of a boxcar full of 10 hobos and saying, “Now fight for it!” Sure, in the bloody aftermath you can say to each of the losers, “Hey, you could have had it if you’d fought harder!” and that’s true on an individual level. But not collectively — you knew goddamned well that nine hobos weren’t getting any hooch that night. So why are you acting like it’s their fault that only one of them is drunk?
And those are just a few short excerpts. There are a few places it could be a little better or make some stronger cases, but overall it’s one of the funniest, clearest and most accessible non-technical works out there on the arguments around income inequality. If you have non-political friends who have fallen for some of the one percent’s talking points, I highly recommend sharing it with them.
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