I am a relatively poor man, however, I am familiar with some true finer things in life intimately. Cask strength single malt scotches, fountain pens with custom hand made bespoke nibs, and others. But that single quote is the most over the top ridiculous statement of pretentiousness I have ever heard. Just…wow. Wow!
Ooo… * TWO * boat docks. Fhaaaancy… 
Not so true now though. Spending less over a life, (really less, if you include the cost of education for your children or quite often the need to pay off your own student debt or a spouse’s, or both) makes you likely to have a retirement, but not gonna make you rich.
The way to wealth in the current western world is by inheritance, connections, and employment in an industry that can lobby for largess, or being in an industry underwritten by government fiat, like the FIRE sector.
Thank goodness we’ve been bombarded in print and video for forty years about the ability of the free market to produce wealth for all! And by the very same people who have been gorging at the trough…
Don’t forget the money to be made by business owners through outsourcing, offshoring, operating illegally disrupting traditional methods/models, exploiting workers supporting the gig economy, and cheating on your taxes creative accounting.
One summer I did some grounds and boat maintenance for the Lindbergh family at one of their mansions. It wasn’t a place for entertaining, but for living in, where they kept a few modest boats on a small private dock on the Long Island Sound. The house was cluttered with the bric-a-brac of several generations of a family growing up, growing old, and moving on, nothing ostentatious other than having several acres of waterfront property in a secluded area. It felt homey, well worn and lived in, not a place of great treasures, though I did note a couple of pieces of a certain airplane that didn’t accompany the rest of the plane to the Smithsonian. I’d recently toured several of the Newport Mansions, and was struck by the similarity in construction quality – lots of stone, marble, quarter-sawn white oak even in the kitchen and boathouse – but unlike those abandoned white elephants, this clearly was where a large family still lived, and clearly valued their privacy and comfort more than any sort of gaudy display of wealth. Beautiful ironwork in the gates and fences, too, clearly the work of some mastersmith in ages before mass production.
“Rich” ain’t what it used to be what with increasing wealth disparity and concentration; for most Americans these days a modest debt-free retirement lived out in a home that’s mostly paid off, something that was once well within the grasp of a unionised blue-collar worker, is something that’s reserved for the affluent.
That said, Pratchett’s point still holds: if she doesn’t care about impressing others with conspicuous consumption then a wealthy person ends up spending less money for the same or a slightly more carefree lifestyle that a peer who has less capital enjoys. That person is paying cash for what the other buys on credit or rents (e.g. a home), can buy more durable and more reliable and higher performance versions of the items that the other buys, and likely will still have extra money above and beyond what he socks away to have a retirement comparable to the other person’s. Over time that adds up and compounds, especially if you have enough to also (as you note) pay off your outstanding student debt and ensure your own kids don’t have to take on their own.
As @PsiPhiGrrl notes there are a few more options, most also based as much on good fortune or flexible ethics as they are on hard work. Except for a relatively brief period between 1945 and 2007 in the U.S. that’s been the historical norm. Now we’re getting back to the old rigged system and the rougher world for most people that accompanies it.
They knew the postwar economic anomaly wouldn’t last forever and propagandised the peons accordingly, all the while hoarding their wealth and preparing for the day when they’d shut the gates and pull up the ladders.
The kidnapping incident accelerated a learning curve that usually takes 2-3 generations of living in extreme wealth: better just be filthy rich than filthy rich and famous.
Yes. I know a man in Maine whose worth is >150MM. He drives the refrigerated truck from one of his businesses home at night, and parks it next to the 20 year old subaru. His son is every bit as down to earth, drives a 30 year old nissan pickup.
MAINE.
(Granted, he also has a 80 year old Jaguar, but that lives in the garage)
Under the auditor’s interpretation of the original contracts, the department’s five captains would have each earned an average of $434,841 in total pay. Seven lieutenants would have each earned an average of $268,935 in total pay. The 13 sergeants would have each earned an average of $189,252 in total pay, according to the auditor’s calculations.
The new agreement would instead see each captain earning $188,206 in average total pay. The average total pay for each lieutenant would be $158,377. And the average total pay for each sergeant would be $127,785 – a figure based now on 12 sergeants instead of 13 due to an officer’s retirement at the end of June. The Eagle-Tribune first reported these figures on Saturday.
The problem with the raises came from the “stacking” of many ancillary benefits into officers’ base pay – a new method of calculation included in the contracts – that significantly inflated salaries, according to the city auditor’s interpretation of the contracts. Ancillary benefits include compensation such as the Quinn Bill education incentive, holiday pay and a uniform cleaning allowance.
Salaries also compound up the chain of command. In the original contracts, a sergeant’s base pay is calculated as 132 percent of the highest-paid patrolman’s base pay; a lieutenant’s is 116 percent of the highest-paid sergeant; and a captain’s is 116 percent of the highest-paid lieutenant’s salary.
The new agreement removes ancillary benefits from base pay calculations, resulting in what city officials called “significant savings.”
One captain, who currently earns $157,052.16, would have earned $440,735.42 under the “stacking” method. He will now earn $191,460.17 in total pay for fiscal year 2019, still a nearly 22 percent raise, according to the memorandum.
From my experiences knowing some very wealthy persons, the more you have the more that’s given out to you as well. It seems that rich people tend to get a lot of things for free as incentives and lubrication for future business deals. Comped suites in Vegas for example or free sports tickets from vendors.
This is my plan and what I’m working towards - a debt free retirement. Anything else is gravy.
Yes. Here’s another example of how just pretending to be wealthy can result in people giving you free stuff:
There’s also the Robb Report (https://robbreport.com) although why they include that extra “b” in the title has always confused me.
Perhaps we could spend a little time contemplating that we, the world’s 1%-ers, owe the rest of the world, rather than spending our time bitterly contemplating what the developed world’s 1%-ers owe us.
But no, somehow it’s always someone else who is greedy beyond comprehension, and not ourselves.
The failure to recognize our own privilege is never healthy for any group, be it the left, right, up or down. Articles that focus only on “how dare those guys have so much more than I do” are poison to realizing how much more we have than 99% of the world and thus our responsibilities to them.
Other-ing the rich is way less terrible that other-ing the poor. But that doesn’t make it good. It makes us prone to populists promising to punish our enemies and makes us less likely to be willing to make the sacrifices that we need to make a truly improve our fellow human’s lives. Sitting back and simply hating doesn’t build a better world.
Who is in a better position to actually make a positive impact on the rest of the world: a billionaire who needs to read glossy lifestyle magazines just to get new ideas for how to spend his obscene fortune on ever-more-ridiculous vanity goods or a working-class American who may or may not be able to pay for basic medical care?
As long as it’s done in good faith, sure. All too often, though, that suggestion is a dodge by adherents of the neoliberal consensus to distract from the increasing domestic inequality and concentration of wealth that’s resulted from the policies they support.
As the mentions of oligarchs from the developing world who read this magazine suggest, this is a story about a magazine catering to the extravagant tastes of the global 1% (less than 1%, in fact – on a planet of 7-billion there are only 36-million HNWIs, many of whom can’t afford these extravagances). It’s not unfairly othering them to point out that they’re often spending more on a wristwatch than an average American makes in a year, and question whether that might be socially sustainable.
Oddly enough, with regards to my own action, this middle-class Canadian can make more of a positive difference to the world that some billionaire who I don’t know. Moreover, the idea that because my contribution won’t be as large frees me of any need to think about my own contributions is pure poison (partially because it’s such an attractive excuse for abdication of responsibility).
Moreover, articles like this (as opposed to the many other admirable articles on this site) aren’t about me making any difference. They’re about hating people who are way wealthier than I am, while I ignore the fact that I’m way wealthier than most of the world. Everything about the article suggests that inequality only matters from me on up. The real poor don’t count.
And even that would be fine, after all, let’s start at home. But thus article isn’t about addressing inequality on any level more than “let’s hate the rich”.
Agreed, and if this was about improving inequality in our own society, I’d have held my words. But this was really a “let’s hate the tasteless rich”. (Meanwhile I find myself glancing at my Ikea catalog and wincing. “Nice things that most of the world can’t afford, makes me detestable, eh?”)
And I spent several hundred dollars on a smart-phone, which is more than much of the world makes in a year. Difference in degree? Yes. In principle, only a little.
There are lots of people who claim that only hate can motivate people enough to actually take action. and perhaps they’re right. But I’m not yet cynical enough to believe that’s only way to move society. (I blame seeing Star Wars during my formative years - using the Dark Side to try and do good never ends well.)
The United States leads the world in wealth inequality, and that gap continues to grow. That’s not just a big problem for Americans (many of whom can’t afford things like basic healthcare) but also creates a trickle-down problem for the rest of the world. I support both private and taxpayer-funded projects to slow the spread of HIV in Africa and bring clean drinking water to Haiti and whatnot, but it’s a lot harder to get working-class Americans to care about those things when they see billionaires in gold-plated hoveryachts telling them that their own country can’t possibly afford to provide its most vulnerable citizens with the most basic needs for survival.
No, this article is about highlighting a specific group of the super-rich who spend billions on ostentatious status symbols just to show the rest of the world how fantastically wealthy they are. It’s not publicly shaming the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or Larry Ellison’s contributions to medical research.
There are a handful of occasions where I’ll celebrate tastelessness (usually involving Mel Brooks or John Waters); wealthy people spending more than $55,000 on a gaudy bauble because a magazine suggests it isn’t one of them.
Here’s a map of the countries where they have stores (yellow is future markets). Most of these countries either have a large enough middle class or an upper-class that considers Ikea high-end for the company to justify opening locations there. The products you see in your catalogue are the same ones at roughly the same price that someone in Moscow or Egypt might buy. It’s also worth noting that there are a lot of Americans who can’t afford Ikea’s prices and consider it a luxury brand.
“Destestable” isn’t you or someone in Egypt buying a Billy bookcase for $50. “Societally unsustainable” (and, in the context of trying to preserve a liberal democracy with a strong middle class, “destestable”) is someone dropping $4k+ on a single pair of shoes made from reindeer leather salvaged from a sunken brigantine and bragging about it.
I’m not going to begrudge a middle-class Canadian spending less than 1% of his annual gross income on an item he uses every day. My eyebrows will go up at a multi-millionaire Canadian spending less than 1% of his annual gross income on a gold- and diamond-encrusted version of a phone with less functionality that costs 10x the price of your phone.
You won’t see many of those people here. Again, the references to guillotines on this site are admonitory and not prescriptive. We’re discussing what can happen in the U.S. when a ever-tinier number can afford (and worse, flaunt) ridiculous extravagances like those advertised in the magazine while the middle-class continues to shrink and the ranks of those who risk bankruptcy just for getting sick grows ever larger.
