Wealth Derangement Syndrome
It’s convenient to think the wealthy are awful
It is a truth of modern storytelling that rich people must be portrayed with one or more of the following tropes: wicked, miserable in their marriages, awful parents, or shamefully outlandish spenders.
And if a wicked rich person goes through an awakening, a transformation that leads to a reformation of their character, the inciting incident must be the sudden and humiliating loss of their wealth.
On the surface, the strictures of these depictions seem pleasing to everyone. The wealthy––the 1%–– can feel superior to their villainous peers. For others, the depictions of the miserable rich can take the edge off envy. If wealth is corrosive to character and inimical to family values, then there is some retributive justice for the unjustly wealthy. No one with any good sense would want to be a wealthy jerk.
A sentence that stunned me
In an interview last week in the New York Times, Sarah Schulman, a professor and accomplished writer and activist, was speaking to the necessity of opposing Donald Trump by using a “big tent” approach. Her point was that people have different reasons for opposing Trump. The most effective opposition for any national political movement is to eliminate purity tests where one particular opinion or attribute is disqualifying.
I was nodding along in agreement until I read this sentence.
“Many people in the United States have projected their anxieties and problems onto immigrants without realizing that it’s actually being caused by the 1 percent that are stealing the wealth of the country." 1
I was stopped cold by that smug and stupid sentence, contradictory to the big tent approach Professor Schulman herself is advocating. Essentially, she’s saying that everyone in the 1% is a thief and should be excluded from her movement. That includes me, my family, and many of my friends.
Why would Professor Schulman make such a statement?
Misrepresenting the wealthy
A few of my own past posts have fed into the narrative about the bad behavior of the wealthy. For example, I wrote about a billionaire impetuously calling my wife and me “moochers.” In the same post, however, I wrote about our wealthy friends, our kind and well-mannered hosts, witnessing this behavior and feeling ashamed at what had been said to us in their home. 2
The truth is that our friends and my family are the rule; the obnoxious billionaire is the exception.
You may think my view is skewed. Maybe we don’t get invited to the right parties, the ones where rich people gather to gloat. Or maybe we don’t spend enough time on social media gawking at pictures of rich people flaunting., like the picture below.3
But at 63, I’ve met a statistically significant number of rich people and I will tell you that they are no better or worse than any other economic class.
I’m uncertain whether it’s reassuring or disquieting for people to know that the standard depictions of the wealthy are wildly misrepresentative.
As for me, I’m happily married. I have loving relationships with my children and their spouses. I’m charitable. I’m not immodest in spending but not flamboyant either, and I didn’t earn my wealth by immoral means.
I’m no exception. Most of the wealthy people I know, whether in the 1% or the 0.1%, are similar to me. 4 We are not appropriate scapegoats, as Professor Schulman claimed, for what’s wrong with society.
Depictions of the wealthy have become worse
As someone who writes about wealth I am attuned to stories about the wealthy, and I find that portrayals of the wealthy as horrible people are becoming increasingly over-the-top. In the latest season of the TV show White Lotus, for example, the wealthy characters are particularly awful.
Fraud is only bad if you’re caught-–White Lotus Spoiler in this section
I’ll focus on the character of Timothy Ratliff, the patriarch of the show’s core wealthy family. He is a thoroughly bad man.
He arrives at the show’s setting in Thailand, a luxurious Four Seasons-type resort, in command of his family without a care in the world. He and his wife project an air of entitlement––his kids are a mix of entitlement and confusion.
But Ratliff’s wealth is built on a fraud, one he believes he’s gotten away with. This doesn’t seem to concern him until while on vacation he learns that the long-buried fraud has surfaced and he has been implicated. Only then does he become unsettled, maniacally so, as he realizes that he will lose all his wealth and will likely be jailed.
He handles this by taking loads of his wife’s anti-anxiety pills, by drinking, and by contemplating the thought of suicide in combination with killing his wife and those of his children he believes will be unable to survive in the world without their wealth.
There’s no mention of who his fraud victims are. No remorse for his victims either. Just self-pity that he’s been caught.
Conspicuous Consumption is the point––Your Friends and Neighbors
There’s a new show called Your Friends and Neighbors set in a Greenwich-like community of over-the-top hedge fund wealth and conspicuous consumption.
The premise of the show is that the main character, Jon Hamm as a hedge funder, is screwed over by his nefarious boss and fired. His wife has left him for his best friend, and he has a difficult relationship with his two children. To keep up appearances, he decides to start robbing his friends and neighbors of their bankrolls and watches.
As part of one robbery, there’s essentially an advertisement for Patek Phillipe watches that even uses the brand’s tagline,
“You never actually own a Patek Phillipe. You merely look after it for the next generation.”
We’re told it’s a $200,000 watch. I don’t know anyone who wears watches like that.
As well, the show features ubiquitous appearances of bottles of Macallan 25 (cost: $3,800), even at a backyard barbecue. Everyone’s constantly asking for and drinking “the 25” as if it was Poland Spring.
I’ve never tasted “the 25” nor been offered it, and I’d be embarrassed to order it or serve it. 5
I suspect product placement deals. Or maybe the show’s writers found the perfect products to underscore just how loathsome and desperate the characters are in their need to impress.
Dickens was more balanced
Stories were not always constructed so that all the rich characters were vile.
In the work of Dickens, for example, while there are many villainous rich people who prey on the poor–– his sympathies are clearly with the poor––there are also wealthy and anonymous benefactors who are moved by their hearts to steer the lives of orphan children in a beneficent direction.
Or take Scrooge, the personification of a nasty and stingy rich person. Scrooge reforms himself not by being sent to a poor house (as would probably be the case in a modern retelling) but by having the Spirits of his Past, Present, and Future show him that his life has been and will continue to be devoid of kindness and love unless he transforms himself. And at the tale’s end, we see Scrooge’s transformation to kindness and charity.
Real Life Archetypes
Unfortunately, the stereotypes of the fictional wealthy are confirmed by the people we associate with great wealth. We think of Musk and Bezos as wealthy archetypes not just for their great wealth but because they have avidly sought celebrity. Their adolescent antics grab our attention. They entertain and disgust us as much as any television show.
There’s Elon Musk and his many children from many mothers as well as his blatant disregard for and mockery of the global poor. There’s Jeff Bezos and his physical transformation from central casting nerd to central casting he-man, his image completed by the cliché of his equally chiseled trophy (soon to be) second wife Lauren Sanchez.
Then there’s the recent widely publicized and widely panned space trip taken by Sanchez and five other female celebrities on Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket ship. It was an obvious publicity stunt whose main point seems to have been the glamorous outfits. My friend
nailed it when she said the event gave “everyone the ick.” 6
How people see the wealthy
When many people view the 1% as irredeemable solely by virtue of their wealth, that’s one factor that leads to communities and networks of friends segregated by economic class.
And when people have little to no intimate contact with the wealthy except through television, social media, and reading about people like Musk and Bezos, it’s those impressions of the wealthy that will end up being definitive for them.
We know that stereotypes are dangerous, whether of the wealthy or the working class.
I was interviewed last year by the amazing
about what it’s like to be wealthy and live in New York City. I keep thinking about the lead-in to one of her questions.“Earlier today, I got my hair cut, and I told my hairdresser, ‘I'm going to talk to a very rich person about what it's like to live in New York City.’ And my hairdresser said, ‘If the guy says he's feeling sorry for himself, that his life is terrible, I don't think I would like him. But if he said, 'Everything's awesome, I love my life!' I don't think I'd like that either. I'm not sure what he could say that would make me like him’!” 7
’s quote of her hairdresser is a great segue to my question for the comments: What is your opinion of the wealthy and what forms that opinion?
Interview in the New York Times. April 10th.
Daily Mail Article from April 17th titled “We’re The Rich People Of Instagram And You’re Just Jealous”
The “1%” has become code for being wealthy. Does it mean income or does it mean wealth? And how accurate are the numbers you might find on the internet?
I’ll stick with wealth as the metric because income is notoriously difficult to measure for the wealthy because a lot of income comes sporadically from realized capital gains. The Federal Reserve does report wealth thresholds. As of Q3, 2022. their data shows a household needed $2.2 mm of net worth to be in the top 10%, $11.2 million to be in the top 1%, and $46.3 million to be in the top 0.1%.
$3,800 price for a bottle of Macallan 25 quoted by our local liquor store, Bottle and Soul, on April 16th. I had to quickly dampen the owner’s excitement by telling him the quote was for research not for buying purposes.
I don’t actually know any rich people personally. It has never occurred to me to generalize them, given that no other social class has any kind of uniform character. I have two people I know are rich who subscribe to me. One is on the liberal left, the other is quite rightist. I get along with both just fine.
As an experiment, I invite any rich person or group of rich people to give me several million dollars to see if it turns me evil. If it does, I’ll give it back. That’s how science works.
My opinion of the wealthy… I’m not necessarily sure this piece changes it, though I always appreciate your point of view and your writing. Thank you.
I’ve spent the past nearly 30 years living in the UK and France, returning home to the US to be close to family (on the dawn of this presidency that most Europeans -counting myself as One- thought impossible to occur). As I re-enter The American Way, and Capitalism in the raw, I find myself not angry at ‘the wealthy’, but at the systems that allow this to happen at the neglect of the poor and middle classes. What I observe as ‘Conservatism’ and oft the preferred stance of those holding enough wealth, is an innate belief that ‘everyone’ can, so they should. Can = achieve gainful employment that pays their household bills AND healthcare AND savings, education, healthcare. The numbers don’t add up. The thinking is maligned.
In fact, not ‘everyone’ can. Many are born into situations that are virtually inescapable, devoid of the real foundational help needed for seismic change to cut the cords of generational trauma or belief systems. Many are born without the intellect or with seen or unseen ‘handicaps’ and hurdles that make daily life a difficult task. They just are. Adding insult to injury, when a government is meant to govern and -in my opinion- look after the people (ALL the people), and it doesn’t… and the people are told that ‘the wealthy effect’ will trickle down… it doesn’t. It never has. Or, the trickle is akin to the ‘wealthy’ choosing the industries, people or causes that they relate to. In my experience, the happiest cultures are those where social democracy is the norm. Where everyone matters and everyone pays into the pot… to support those that otherwise cannot. So, until wealthy is untied from conservatism, I feel this spotlight that is being shown on ‘the wealthy’ is more due to the tone-deaf nature of conservatism more than anything else.