I’ll admit that I find ascribing motives for other’s actions about as attractive as people ascribing motives to me.
Ascribing evil motives is pretty much hate-mongering 101. “Dressing nice makes me feel confident, but he’s dressing up to show he’s wealthier than everyone else.” Maybe the motives are true. But presenting guesses as facts? Not cool.
Agreed. But articles like this are an attempt to recruit to a good cause by means of hate. The line gets pretty blurry.
Even in my youth, I spent money on useless baubles (T-shirts with art I liked rather than a much cheaper, better quality t-shirt. Difference in degree - not difference in kind.)
(And yes, my eyebrows go up at those baubles as well, but let’s face it - I’m the green guy.)
Fighting for more equality between green and red is a good. Full stop.
But we can do so without being hypocrites. And articles like this push us towards hypocrisy.
Gracchus, do you really think articles of this particular variety (concentrating on consumption and inventing motives) actually help the left?
Because in my opinion, the small amount they do to highlight wealth differences that we somehow weren’t already aware of do not come close to matching the damage they cause by promoting hate while suppressing our knowledge of where we are in the privilege hierarchy. They push the idea that we in the 70-95th percentile of North American society owe nothing more - we can take it all from those super-rich guys. Poison.
The vast majority of articles politically oriented articles here concentrate on actual harms being done, identifying things that many of us aren’t aware of. They provide knowledge that we can use to fight such harms.
This article fell far from that standard.
Okay…
Um, say what now?
Amazon sold me the rope to hang Jeff Bezos with.
I do, because as a matter of course they expose (in a non-celebratory way) a world of excess that still remains hidden to a larger audience, including affluent people. This includes showing the level of excess to financially comfortable liberals who might otherwise be distracted by conservatives who want them to think that they’re the cause of inequality in American society because they’re also part of the global 1%. It’s not calling for guillotines but it is another way of combating this game:
https://img.ifcdn.com/images/187cbeef4b52c35ee7b5ec64b56c5bdc73cb74e885966c75e737409ad10be3a1_1.gif
This article in particular also shows the degree to which the media-industrial complex depends on being servants to the ultra-wealthy (“How to Spend It” is one of the major profit centres of the FT). The article isn’t “inventing motives”, it’s quoting the staff of the magazine describing them. That aspect and the history of how the section evolved into what it is was just as interesting as the other aspect.
The article says and implies nothing of the sort. What it does is raise the kind of discussion you’ve seen in this thread, about class and consumption and the UHNWIs who (as evinced by their purchases) can most afford to set an example for “merely” HNWI and affluent individuals (as well as for the GOP’s temporarily embarrassed millionaire base) as far as paying properly progressive taxes are concerned.
The difference in degree in the case of items advertised in this supplement are magnitudes of order greater than those between your t-shirts, especially since personal aesthetics don’t play into their target audience’s priorities like they did with yours.
The pyramid cartoon, while amusing, is an exaggeration that doesn’t relect the proportions of global inequality, let alone domestic U.S. inequality (although the 35 year campaign to push us there continues). The real goal is to make green (which I assume represents those enjoying a comfortable middle class lifestyle) take up most of that pyramid.
Very well said. Good catch.
I suppose I judged the article by how it affected me and assumed that was what the writer intended to do.
Of course. And while I’m still not comfortable with this approach, you make a reasonable defense for articles such as these, so I’ll hold off any further comments in this thread (as well as being properly chastened by milliefink).
Just want to say that I do appreciate and agree with what I’ve been reading here as your general reminder that a lot of people spend too much time looking up the economic ladder at those above them, when they should spend more time considering the lot of those below them.
There’s a scene in Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano in which members of the elite ruling class of a dystopian society go on an annual retreat (a-la the Bohemian Grove) to relax and reaffirm how awesome they are.
The retreat culminates in a play in which one of the working class shlubs confronts his masters, asking why they should have so much wealth and power while leaving so little for everyone else. The wise master counters that the working class guy has access to modern conveniences like plumbing and electrical devices while Caesar, even with all his riches, could not have purchased even a single vacuum tube. The working class guy is awed and humbled, the moral being that he should be grateful that he has so many things someone else didn’t instead of upset that he lives in a society where a handful of elites have so much more than everyone else.
Don’t be that guy.
(Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t be grateful for the things you have, just that it’s not an argument against the obscene and growing degree of wealth inequality in our society.)
If one is 10x as responsible for a problem, one might be tempted to support any effort to split the load evenly, 50/50 like. Privatize the profit, socialize the risk.
I mean, maybe they’re paying premium prices for showy goods that are every bit as disposable as what is available to the common people… for humanitarian reasons?
Sort of. Not to defend Warren Buffet of all persons, but in a world where “private plane” can mean a tricked-out Airbus A380, I’m willing to concede that a Cessna Citation Latitude (which is part of a small rent-a-plane company’s fleet) passes off as quite modest.
Not quite the same target demographic, though.
Where is Moses when you need him?
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
