Dear Readers, I love your comments, because they make me think harder and more critically about what I’ve written. I especially love to read the interaction between readers who use my posts as a jumping off point to carry the discussion into the realm of new questions and new ideas.
Dave, I love your posts. In part because you are such a good writer. And in part because you are often writing about things I am thinking about. I share many of your experiences: three children (now grown, in their 40s); the decision to send them to private schools; how to handle privilege and what to convey to them about it (our philosophy and approach mirror yours). So far, I am not brave enough to write about these things on Substack. These can be ticklish, awkward topics, subject to misinterpretation and even inviting scorn. So thank you once again!
Reminds me of a man I know who worked his way from Food Stamps to spectacular success. He remains highly contemptuous of his competitors’ inherited wealth while he brings his children into the family business... But this is natural. When we hear the word “aristocrat” our thoughts run to England, where there were never more than a 1,000 such families. The advent of the Middle Class rendered the concept of Noblesse Oblige obsolete, and it has disappeared from Western culture. But it must return. Consider the elite high schools and colleges. They use full-tuition payers and endowments to subsidize poor applicants. There is no place at these schools for Middle Class kids. The wealth gap will widen, with only the occasional Cromwell breaking through. I think you’re absolutely right that modeling behavior is of more value than denying this reality. And it wouldn’t hurt to restore words like ”gentleman” and “honor” from disuse. Though maybe not “class”....
-- Your essay provides a compelling exploration, David. The thoughtful analysis encourages us, the readers, to reflect on our own perspectives, fostering a deeper understanding of the complex dynamics at play in our society. Xo.
I suppose I would need to know what difficulties she is speaking about. Most people experience death, broken hearts, loss, helplessness. Many people experience family issues. Drug and alcohol abuse and addiction, divorce, out of wedlock children, legal issues, insolvency, developmentally challenged children.
I know a woman whose husband was extremely wealthy. Retired in his 40s. They had two children and multiple homes. He was killed while piloting his airplane. Their privilege didn't save him, and her life was shattered for years. I was shocked at her appearance and personality when she showed up in town a year later. She was a beautiful, friendly, compassionate person. No longer. They sold out and moved away not long after I ran into her. I hope she recovered.
Parents will always, or most always, protect their children from the world as best they can and with whatever resources they can muster. We have never had much, but we did try to teach our kids about how easy they had it compared to so many just as I was taught as a kid. We sent them to the best colleges we could afford (Still paying on it!) and they are both successful, decent men. They are happy and healthy which is all we could ask for. They also have both had tragedy strike their lives and dealt with it.
I'm not sure about the whole privilege thing. Its portrayed as a bad thing but is it really? Isn't it only as bad as the person who has it? That just means the person in question would be awful in whatever circumstances they live in.
You're looking for objectivity where there is only subjectivity. I just re-read a wonderful book, The Drunkard's Walk, by Leonard Mlodinow, in which he demonstrates the degree of randomness in everyday life and how difficult it is for people to deal with. In the end, it's all about trying to improve the odds. Children of privilege or no privilege with loving, caring, thoughtful parents can turn out to be jerks, and children of jerks can turn out to loving, caring, and thoughtful. We do our best to inculcate our children with what we think are good values and then are forced to watch the process play out with no real control of the outcome. Resources help, of course, but are hardly determinate. I have a theory that most people hope for good luck when what they really want is an absence of bad luck, which are not at all the same thing. (For the record, our daughter turned out far, far differently than we planned for or expected but is utterly wonderful.)
I love and appreciate your honesty— in all your pieces. Isabels question is important yet it can lead to a generalized answer. It depends— is my answer for such a broad question. It depends on the individual. I find that folks who are more spiritual, meditate, have self awareness, believe in a higher power that is loving, treat others as they would treat themselves, love thy neighbor, etc, they are in touch and will involve themselves with the less privileged. Superficial isolationism is unavoidable. All one has to do is look at home prices in various area codes. Real estate alone isolates. It’s the individual who must make the effort.
"I can say that my wife and I succeeded in modelling respect and empathy for our children. And we know this because of the vicious way our children pounced on us whenever we failed to be empathetic ourselves."
Ha! Both my teenagers are like this. They keep me honest, as the saying goes. Great point.
David - first and foremost, thanks for being open and vulnerable with really personal things. I think it is important and establishes trust with us readers. Secondly, it is a really well written article and I enjoyed reading your thoughts.
I think that this is a challenging but important topic. In my opinion privilege is highly subjective. In my rural hometown in Missouri my family was definitely on the low end of the income spectrum. In comparison to my peers I was not privileged in any way. Yet if compared to inner city youth or children in third world countries, my upbringing would have seemed like paradise. As a kid I had absolutely no point of reference to compare against the wealthy (new or old money) as that simply wasn't a part of my experience.
When I first started in the Navy I was very low rank. My wife and I used WIC when we first had children and we needed every bit of assistance the Navy could give us to get on our feet. As I got promoted, got my degree, eventually became an officer, etc... our financial situation improved drastically. My wife grew up in a third world country so we both wanted something better for our children than what we had. Our kids always went to public school but we did try to make sure they had some amenities that were nice. We didn't allow them cell phones until high school but they had nice shoes and clothes and video games, etc... We were comfortably middle-class.
Fortunately our son is very intelligent and is going to college on scholarship. We had some money saved in 529 funds but we can pass that to our daughter if needed. We have been frugal and have good investment and no debt other than a mortgage. At this point we are comfortable.
More importantly than all this financial stuff though is the fact that our children are good people. My kids are kind, considerate, respectful, and good citizens for their age. I think that is what every parent really wants. We gave them what our means enabled us to financially but we gave them everything we could to make them into good people.
Someone else commented that money isn't a determinate on personality. There can be rich jerks and poor jerks and the opposites are true as well.
Those are my thoughts on a Saturday morning with only one cup of coffee in my system. Thanks for such an engaging topic.
David, Your posts about privilege are courageous and valuable. As your children learned at school, privilege is relative. We hear it spoken of as a golden cape that some people wear and others don't, but it may be more like a sound engineer's mixing board, each person's share of treble, bass, tremolo, etc, unique.
As for the question, "At what point does privilege lead to isolationism from the difficulties most people face?", this question makes perfect sense to me emerging from your rude-people-in-first-class post (if that's where it came up) because those people conferred on themselves some bonus privileges by exempting themselves from the rules. They chose social exceptionalism. Not so in the current post. You have modeled responsibility and humility for your kids. When we realize that privileges are plural and multiform (not singular, monolithic, and invested only in a small number of people), that would seem to be the best any of us can do with the various privileges given to us.
My parents made me work a factory job one summer, and refused to let me have a car unless I bought it with money that I had earned. The great lesson for me was less about how lucky I was than about how much my parents cared about the kind of adult I would turn into. Yes, it’s very much about the examples we set, but it’s also about the expectations we set, and equally important, the ways we express those expectations.
This is such an intriguing issue, and one I think many parents are often preoccupied with, if they've managed to amass any amount of economic affluence. In our case, we're the second generation adults of immigrants, and while we've had support from our parents and worked very hard to get to a certain level, we are not in a space to provide our children with private school educations, though we seriously tried to crunch the numbers. What we did instead was put everything we had into moving to a neighbourhood with excellent public schooling that's sought after, and then supplement with after school activities and academic enrichment. Going from the suburbs, where everyone is essentially in the same socioeconomic bubble, to this older neighbourhood, where there are people who have amassed much less than us AND people who have amassed much more than us, meant that we had to have serious conversations with our children about privilege, and what we could afford, not to mention our values when it came to spending even if we could afford certain things but didn't want to partake in them.
Our bubble has been somewhat shattered because of this, although I think the kids mostly notice those who have more rather than those who have less. I hope they're able to see the value of not being extravagant over time, and of putting our resources into the things that mattered most (their education, rather than luxury material items).
My sister's experience mirrors yours a little more, I think. Living as an expat in the UAE for years, her kids have gone to private schools with children who go to Paris for the weekend and drive Mercedes at 16, or have an endless open tab at the school canteen. I visited her last October, as you know, and found their massive, beautiful house in a gated community already so luxurious, so to think that the children might see themselves as less privileged is a bit shocking, but it's all about the bubble you're in.
I don't think it matters how much money you have because as you point out, it's all relative and comparison is inevitable at any level on the poor to rich ladder.
At some point most of us will find ourselves more privileged than others--depending on where we choose our comparisons. When my three kids (almost all now in their 30's) were growing up, I would say we were solidly middle class. As in, we weren't rich, but "they weren't starving children in Africa." My husband and I both grew up poor--subsidized housing and raiding gardens to eat for him and single mother, single income, living in one-bedroom apartment for many years, for me.
But, we both had a roof over our heads and food (mostly). So, what more could you ask for?
As a result, when my kids were growing up and they had the benefit of swimming lessons, soccer, grandparents, and a nice-ish house where they had bedrooms, with a mom and dad who were still together and loved them, I thought they were RICH in comparison.
So ANY complaints from them, drove me mad. "Don't you know how lucky you are??" was a refrain I would use often. Until, with the help of alot of therapy, I realized, no, they have no idea. They can only experience life from their own perspectives and how they are living it. I can't superimpose my experiences on them.
To your point about trying to teach them about their privilege, such as we saw it; one Christmas we visited an old-age home on Christmas Eve day and handed out lap blankets to the elderly who were confined to their rooms and were by themselves. Lap blankets that had been crocheted and donated to us by a church. I wanted them to learn about giving and not just receiving. They were in elementary school. We didn't have alot of money for gifts for them, so this was our way to celebrate Christmas with them that year.
All this to say privilege is relative. In the end, as you write in this very thoughtful post, all we can do is hope like heck we've modelled empathy and caring for others. Even if we weren't so perfect at it ourselves. That's the best gift we can give our children. Them calling us out on our own behaviour is a sure example we've done our job--oddly, a good thing. As maddening as it may be at the time!
I can't write from a perspective of privilege in that sense, but I can write from the perspective of living in poverty for most of my life, and in my experience the tendency for some parents, myself included, is to over compensate for what they lack.
This may involve items they can afford, or maybe not really afford but are willing to forgo on other things to get for their kids. Or it can be overcompensating by letting them get away with bad behavior, lax structure or expectations that can be compromised... think endless second chances, not being able to follow through on consequences, because they have so little already.
Of course, that can also occur through exhaustion from trying to survive, or just coming from such a bad background that you had no examples of any kind of what boundaries are, yourself. But I did find, as I was raising my kids, there was a general feeling of guilt a lot of financially struggling parents felt for not being able to give their kids what they wanted, or driven to now give them what they didn't have themselves growing up. This does not work out well.
Entitlement can come from being used to being privileged, and living in a bubble, or you can become entitled because you don't live in prosperity, and think you should, and your parents agree.
Another byproduct in my family of not having much money, is I was raised to accept being poor as a virtue, that it was a kind of "holy" privilege, and to see ourselves as "better than those rich people", because "they have money, and we have love". (You will understand if I laugh my ass off every time I think of this.) So having money made you a jerk. Whether you worked for it or inherited it or both, or made friends with a leprechaun and found a pot of gold, it didn't matter.
Thankfully, that belief is healing along with the other beliefs of my family of origin. The privilege of having you as my Substack friend, David, is a big contributor to that. So thank you.
I think it is about perspective, and in many ways is relative, but it's also about the personal relationship we have with money, and prosperity, and the meaning we give to it. Maybe that's what our children inherit the most regardless what we put in our wills.
There are lots of great comments and very personal stories. Thanks for sharing. I'll throw out a different angle to consider.
Teach your children where wealth comes from. There is only one formula: $P= Margin x Volume - Overheads. Poor people have overheads => M x V (hourly rate x hours worked) = no chance to get ahead doing what they are doing. Middle class has a chance if they can beat the overheads. Wealthy people can only stay wealthy if they pay attention to the formula that got them rich. Watch those overheads eg. sailboats can sure depreciate! Now enter post WW2 western governments that set the rules so that stock market and real estate always go up over time. Oops government forgot that poor people don't have stock market investments or real estate. The poor are going to stay poor. Looks like cost of living and real estate prices are going to pressure middle class overheads more and more in the future. My bet is that the rich stay rich and the other 95% loose ground as the deadly D words (debt, depreciation, depletion, ...) disproportionately increase the overheads of the poor and middle class.
Maybe the offspring of the wealthy will understand this better than other generations and make some changes to the "system" before something like French Revolution vs 2 occurs. Marie Antoinette's children had bigger issues than cell phones and designer clothes!
Another excellent piece. I think of my own privilege. Regardless of what I do or think, it prpvides protection and -- by virtue of that - it isolates. Whenever I am tempted to use that privilege to provide further protection - to avoid an unpleasant duty, maybe - I shame myself, usually successfully, by thinking of this (one of many in the great Great Gatsby):
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
Dave, I love your posts. In part because you are such a good writer. And in part because you are often writing about things I am thinking about. I share many of your experiences: three children (now grown, in their 40s); the decision to send them to private schools; how to handle privilege and what to convey to them about it (our philosophy and approach mirror yours). So far, I am not brave enough to write about these things on Substack. These can be ticklish, awkward topics, subject to misinterpretation and even inviting scorn. So thank you once again!
Reminds me of a man I know who worked his way from Food Stamps to spectacular success. He remains highly contemptuous of his competitors’ inherited wealth while he brings his children into the family business... But this is natural. When we hear the word “aristocrat” our thoughts run to England, where there were never more than a 1,000 such families. The advent of the Middle Class rendered the concept of Noblesse Oblige obsolete, and it has disappeared from Western culture. But it must return. Consider the elite high schools and colleges. They use full-tuition payers and endowments to subsidize poor applicants. There is no place at these schools for Middle Class kids. The wealth gap will widen, with only the occasional Cromwell breaking through. I think you’re absolutely right that modeling behavior is of more value than denying this reality. And it wouldn’t hurt to restore words like ”gentleman” and “honor” from disuse. Though maybe not “class”....
-- Your essay provides a compelling exploration, David. The thoughtful analysis encourages us, the readers, to reflect on our own perspectives, fostering a deeper understanding of the complex dynamics at play in our society. Xo.
I suppose I would need to know what difficulties she is speaking about. Most people experience death, broken hearts, loss, helplessness. Many people experience family issues. Drug and alcohol abuse and addiction, divorce, out of wedlock children, legal issues, insolvency, developmentally challenged children.
I know a woman whose husband was extremely wealthy. Retired in his 40s. They had two children and multiple homes. He was killed while piloting his airplane. Their privilege didn't save him, and her life was shattered for years. I was shocked at her appearance and personality when she showed up in town a year later. She was a beautiful, friendly, compassionate person. No longer. They sold out and moved away not long after I ran into her. I hope she recovered.
Parents will always, or most always, protect their children from the world as best they can and with whatever resources they can muster. We have never had much, but we did try to teach our kids about how easy they had it compared to so many just as I was taught as a kid. We sent them to the best colleges we could afford (Still paying on it!) and they are both successful, decent men. They are happy and healthy which is all we could ask for. They also have both had tragedy strike their lives and dealt with it.
I'm not sure about the whole privilege thing. Its portrayed as a bad thing but is it really? Isn't it only as bad as the person who has it? That just means the person in question would be awful in whatever circumstances they live in.
Still, that was a great piece, Robert!
Cheers,
John
Mea Culpa! Not Robert. David. Its 37 below here and my brain is frozen
You're looking for objectivity where there is only subjectivity. I just re-read a wonderful book, The Drunkard's Walk, by Leonard Mlodinow, in which he demonstrates the degree of randomness in everyday life and how difficult it is for people to deal with. In the end, it's all about trying to improve the odds. Children of privilege or no privilege with loving, caring, thoughtful parents can turn out to be jerks, and children of jerks can turn out to loving, caring, and thoughtful. We do our best to inculcate our children with what we think are good values and then are forced to watch the process play out with no real control of the outcome. Resources help, of course, but are hardly determinate. I have a theory that most people hope for good luck when what they really want is an absence of bad luck, which are not at all the same thing. (For the record, our daughter turned out far, far differently than we planned for or expected but is utterly wonderful.)
I love and appreciate your honesty— in all your pieces. Isabels question is important yet it can lead to a generalized answer. It depends— is my answer for such a broad question. It depends on the individual. I find that folks who are more spiritual, meditate, have self awareness, believe in a higher power that is loving, treat others as they would treat themselves, love thy neighbor, etc, they are in touch and will involve themselves with the less privileged. Superficial isolationism is unavoidable. All one has to do is look at home prices in various area codes. Real estate alone isolates. It’s the individual who must make the effort.
"I can say that my wife and I succeeded in modelling respect and empathy for our children. And we know this because of the vicious way our children pounced on us whenever we failed to be empathetic ourselves."
Ha! Both my teenagers are like this. They keep me honest, as the saying goes. Great point.
David - first and foremost, thanks for being open and vulnerable with really personal things. I think it is important and establishes trust with us readers. Secondly, it is a really well written article and I enjoyed reading your thoughts.
I think that this is a challenging but important topic. In my opinion privilege is highly subjective. In my rural hometown in Missouri my family was definitely on the low end of the income spectrum. In comparison to my peers I was not privileged in any way. Yet if compared to inner city youth or children in third world countries, my upbringing would have seemed like paradise. As a kid I had absolutely no point of reference to compare against the wealthy (new or old money) as that simply wasn't a part of my experience.
When I first started in the Navy I was very low rank. My wife and I used WIC when we first had children and we needed every bit of assistance the Navy could give us to get on our feet. As I got promoted, got my degree, eventually became an officer, etc... our financial situation improved drastically. My wife grew up in a third world country so we both wanted something better for our children than what we had. Our kids always went to public school but we did try to make sure they had some amenities that were nice. We didn't allow them cell phones until high school but they had nice shoes and clothes and video games, etc... We were comfortably middle-class.
Fortunately our son is very intelligent and is going to college on scholarship. We had some money saved in 529 funds but we can pass that to our daughter if needed. We have been frugal and have good investment and no debt other than a mortgage. At this point we are comfortable.
More importantly than all this financial stuff though is the fact that our children are good people. My kids are kind, considerate, respectful, and good citizens for their age. I think that is what every parent really wants. We gave them what our means enabled us to financially but we gave them everything we could to make them into good people.
Someone else commented that money isn't a determinate on personality. There can be rich jerks and poor jerks and the opposites are true as well.
Those are my thoughts on a Saturday morning with only one cup of coffee in my system. Thanks for such an engaging topic.
David, Your posts about privilege are courageous and valuable. As your children learned at school, privilege is relative. We hear it spoken of as a golden cape that some people wear and others don't, but it may be more like a sound engineer's mixing board, each person's share of treble, bass, tremolo, etc, unique.
As for the question, "At what point does privilege lead to isolationism from the difficulties most people face?", this question makes perfect sense to me emerging from your rude-people-in-first-class post (if that's where it came up) because those people conferred on themselves some bonus privileges by exempting themselves from the rules. They chose social exceptionalism. Not so in the current post. You have modeled responsibility and humility for your kids. When we realize that privileges are plural and multiform (not singular, monolithic, and invested only in a small number of people), that would seem to be the best any of us can do with the various privileges given to us.
My parents made me work a factory job one summer, and refused to let me have a car unless I bought it with money that I had earned. The great lesson for me was less about how lucky I was than about how much my parents cared about the kind of adult I would turn into. Yes, it’s very much about the examples we set, but it’s also about the expectations we set, and equally important, the ways we express those expectations.
This is such an intriguing issue, and one I think many parents are often preoccupied with, if they've managed to amass any amount of economic affluence. In our case, we're the second generation adults of immigrants, and while we've had support from our parents and worked very hard to get to a certain level, we are not in a space to provide our children with private school educations, though we seriously tried to crunch the numbers. What we did instead was put everything we had into moving to a neighbourhood with excellent public schooling that's sought after, and then supplement with after school activities and academic enrichment. Going from the suburbs, where everyone is essentially in the same socioeconomic bubble, to this older neighbourhood, where there are people who have amassed much less than us AND people who have amassed much more than us, meant that we had to have serious conversations with our children about privilege, and what we could afford, not to mention our values when it came to spending even if we could afford certain things but didn't want to partake in them.
Our bubble has been somewhat shattered because of this, although I think the kids mostly notice those who have more rather than those who have less. I hope they're able to see the value of not being extravagant over time, and of putting our resources into the things that mattered most (their education, rather than luxury material items).
My sister's experience mirrors yours a little more, I think. Living as an expat in the UAE for years, her kids have gone to private schools with children who go to Paris for the weekend and drive Mercedes at 16, or have an endless open tab at the school canteen. I visited her last October, as you know, and found their massive, beautiful house in a gated community already so luxurious, so to think that the children might see themselves as less privileged is a bit shocking, but it's all about the bubble you're in.
What a great topic David.
I don't think it matters how much money you have because as you point out, it's all relative and comparison is inevitable at any level on the poor to rich ladder.
At some point most of us will find ourselves more privileged than others--depending on where we choose our comparisons. When my three kids (almost all now in their 30's) were growing up, I would say we were solidly middle class. As in, we weren't rich, but "they weren't starving children in Africa." My husband and I both grew up poor--subsidized housing and raiding gardens to eat for him and single mother, single income, living in one-bedroom apartment for many years, for me.
But, we both had a roof over our heads and food (mostly). So, what more could you ask for?
As a result, when my kids were growing up and they had the benefit of swimming lessons, soccer, grandparents, and a nice-ish house where they had bedrooms, with a mom and dad who were still together and loved them, I thought they were RICH in comparison.
So ANY complaints from them, drove me mad. "Don't you know how lucky you are??" was a refrain I would use often. Until, with the help of alot of therapy, I realized, no, they have no idea. They can only experience life from their own perspectives and how they are living it. I can't superimpose my experiences on them.
To your point about trying to teach them about their privilege, such as we saw it; one Christmas we visited an old-age home on Christmas Eve day and handed out lap blankets to the elderly who were confined to their rooms and were by themselves. Lap blankets that had been crocheted and donated to us by a church. I wanted them to learn about giving and not just receiving. They were in elementary school. We didn't have alot of money for gifts for them, so this was our way to celebrate Christmas with them that year.
All this to say privilege is relative. In the end, as you write in this very thoughtful post, all we can do is hope like heck we've modelled empathy and caring for others. Even if we weren't so perfect at it ourselves. That's the best gift we can give our children. Them calling us out on our own behaviour is a sure example we've done our job--oddly, a good thing. As maddening as it may be at the time!
I can't write from a perspective of privilege in that sense, but I can write from the perspective of living in poverty for most of my life, and in my experience the tendency for some parents, myself included, is to over compensate for what they lack.
This may involve items they can afford, or maybe not really afford but are willing to forgo on other things to get for their kids. Or it can be overcompensating by letting them get away with bad behavior, lax structure or expectations that can be compromised... think endless second chances, not being able to follow through on consequences, because they have so little already.
Of course, that can also occur through exhaustion from trying to survive, or just coming from such a bad background that you had no examples of any kind of what boundaries are, yourself. But I did find, as I was raising my kids, there was a general feeling of guilt a lot of financially struggling parents felt for not being able to give their kids what they wanted, or driven to now give them what they didn't have themselves growing up. This does not work out well.
Entitlement can come from being used to being privileged, and living in a bubble, or you can become entitled because you don't live in prosperity, and think you should, and your parents agree.
Another byproduct in my family of not having much money, is I was raised to accept being poor as a virtue, that it was a kind of "holy" privilege, and to see ourselves as "better than those rich people", because "they have money, and we have love". (You will understand if I laugh my ass off every time I think of this.) So having money made you a jerk. Whether you worked for it or inherited it or both, or made friends with a leprechaun and found a pot of gold, it didn't matter.
Thankfully, that belief is healing along with the other beliefs of my family of origin. The privilege of having you as my Substack friend, David, is a big contributor to that. So thank you.
I think it is about perspective, and in many ways is relative, but it's also about the personal relationship we have with money, and prosperity, and the meaning we give to it. Maybe that's what our children inherit the most regardless what we put in our wills.
There are lots of great comments and very personal stories. Thanks for sharing. I'll throw out a different angle to consider.
Teach your children where wealth comes from. There is only one formula: $P= Margin x Volume - Overheads. Poor people have overheads => M x V (hourly rate x hours worked) = no chance to get ahead doing what they are doing. Middle class has a chance if they can beat the overheads. Wealthy people can only stay wealthy if they pay attention to the formula that got them rich. Watch those overheads eg. sailboats can sure depreciate! Now enter post WW2 western governments that set the rules so that stock market and real estate always go up over time. Oops government forgot that poor people don't have stock market investments or real estate. The poor are going to stay poor. Looks like cost of living and real estate prices are going to pressure middle class overheads more and more in the future. My bet is that the rich stay rich and the other 95% loose ground as the deadly D words (debt, depreciation, depletion, ...) disproportionately increase the overheads of the poor and middle class.
Maybe the offspring of the wealthy will understand this better than other generations and make some changes to the "system" before something like French Revolution vs 2 occurs. Marie Antoinette's children had bigger issues than cell phones and designer clothes!
Another excellent piece. I think of my own privilege. Regardless of what I do or think, it prpvides protection and -- by virtue of that - it isolates. Whenever I am tempted to use that privilege to provide further protection - to avoid an unpleasant duty, maybe - I shame myself, usually successfully, by thinking of this (one of many in the great Great Gatsby):
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.