Rich People Are Jerks, Explained (Demo)

“These people have grown fat and lazy on Social Security. Let’s cut it.” (Shutterstock)

On June 16, 2015, David Roberts and Javier Zarracina  write on VOX:

So I was reading this story about water restrictions imposed in the wake of California’s horrible drought, and how wealthy people are reacting to them, and it reminded me that rich people are kind of jerks. That’s one big reason lots of solvable social problems aren’t getting solved.

The policy preferences of jerks

Lest we draw overly broad conclusions from one story — maybe the rich are just jerks about water? — let’s take a broader look at the policy preferences of the rich. (Note: when I say “rich,” I mean the 1 percent and above.)

This is of more than academic interest. Recent research from political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page concludes that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

So the attitudes, preferences, and behaviors of the rich have outsize effects not only in terms of their direct dispensation of resources, which is enormous in itself, but even more in terms of their disproportionate influence over public policy, which affects millions.

So what are their preferences? A few years ago, Page, along with fellow political scientists Larry Bartels and Jason Seawright, published a study of the political habits and inclinations of the 1 percent. One thing they found is that the rich are extremely politically active — far more likely to have personal contacts with policymakers, donate money, attend meetings, follow the news, and vote — which (along with, y’know, the money) helps explain why their preferences have such impact.

As to the 1 percent’s policy preferences, the folks at Campaign for America’s Future took the numbers from Page’s study and compared them with past polls, to get a sense of how the preferences of the rich diverge from the general public’s. And oh, do they diverge.

I had Vox’s ace graphics team pretty up the comparison. Here’s how the rich rate things relative to the rest of us:

(Campaign for America’s Future)

Of particular note is the passion of rich people for cutting social programs, which puts them at odds with their fellow Americans:

Page et al. conclude:

… if one accepts, at least for the sake of argument, the notion that the wealthy exert substantial political power, our findings may shed some light on the current state of American politics. For example, the contemporary emphasis in Washington on reducing the federal budget deficit addresses what is, by far, the most important public problem in the minds of wealthy Americans—though not of the American public as a whole. The willingness of many policy makers to cut popular social welfare programs, and their reluctance to increase taxes on people with high incomes, may be explained in part by the fact that social welfare programs and increased taxes on the rich are much less popular among wealthy people than among ordinary citizens. And the turn away from economic regulation in recent decades—a turn that left exotic financial derivatives unregulated before the 2008–09 financial crash in which they played such a prominent part, and that left Washington surprisingly inhospitable to more rigorous banking regulation even after that crash—may be attributable, in part, to the distinctive antipathy of wealthy citizens to government regulation of the economy.

The very top item on rich people’s list of concerns? The deficit. The lowest? Climate change.

Jerks.

Jerks, explained

What is a jerk, anyway?

In 2012, psychologist Paul Piff and colleagues released a set of test results showing that, as the title of the paper puts it, “higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior.” Here’s how New York magazine’s Lisa Miller summarized the work:

[The paper] showed through quizzes, online games, questionnaires, in-lab manipulations, and field studies that living high on the socioeconomic ladder can, colloquially speaking, dehumanize people. It can make them less ethical, more selfish, more insular, and less compassionate than other people. It can make them more likely, as Piff demonstrated in one of his experiments, to take candy from a bowl of sweets designated for children. “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything,” Piff says, “the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.”

Assholes, jerks — semantics. The important bit is “less ethical, more selfish, more insular, and less compassionate than other people.”

Perhaps a case study is in order. Here is one wealthy Californian being a jerk, from theWashington Post story:

“I think we’re being overly penalized, and we’re certainly being overly scrutinized by the world,” said Gay Butler, an interior designer out for a trail ride on her show horse, Bear. She said her water bill averages about $800 a month.

“It angers me because people aren’t looking at the overall picture,” Butler said. “What are we supposed to do, just have dirt around our house on four acres?”

So what are the marks of jerkdom here?

First is the odd contention that those who use more resources are being “overly penalized” and “overly scrutinized” in discussions of how to allot scarce resources, as though having and using more resources should be irrelevant to that discussion. It speaks to a conviction among the rich that they are a disadvantaged class, discriminated against without reason, leading one rich person to compare resentment toward the wealthy to the persecution of Jews in Hitler’s Germany. Did I say one rich person? I meant a bunch of them.

Here is today’s somewhat milder version of the sentiment:

“I call it the war on suburbia,” said Brett Barbre, who lives in the Orange County community of Yorba City, another exceptionally wealthy Zip code.

To hear Barbre tell it, the lifestyles of the wealthy are being targeted arbitrarily, as though the whole business about historic drought is just a convenient pretext to go after McMansions.

Second is the unstated assumption, always hovering in the background, that resources are distributed entirely according to merit. Those who have more deserve more, and have the right to use more. This is true even of public resources. “We pay significant property taxes based on where we live,” said wealthy jerk Steve Yuhas to the Post. “And, no, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.” The rich should get more — that’s what money means!

Third is the rampant narcissism and total lack of self-awareness, such as when Ms. Butler confuses her aesthetic aspirations for her four-acre ranch with “the overall picture.” (Presumably those focusing on the statewide drought have too narrow a lens.) Rich jerk Yuhas bridles at the notion that wealthy people should be “forced to live on property with brown lawns, golf on brown courses or apologize for wanting their gardens to be beautiful.”

“California used to be the land of opportunity and freedom,” said rich jerk Barbre. “It’s slowly becoming the land of one group telling everybody else how they think everybody should live their lives.” (Helpful translation: “one group” means the public; “everybody else” means the very, very wealthy; “live their lives” means water their enormous lawns.)

The legitimacy of jerk-related generalizations about the wealthy

When I say rich people are jerks, do I mean that all rich people are jerks? No, of course not. That’s not how generalizations work. Plenty of rich people are nice enough. Bill Gates, say. “Rich people are jerks” is shorthand for a few related concepts.

First, per Piff, and per most of their public-facing statements, the proportion of jerkdom among the rich appears to be substantially higher than among the general population. Whether becoming very rich makes you a jerk or jerks are more likely to become very rich (I suspect there’s some of both), there’s a correlation.

Second, the Total Jerkdom (TJ) of a given demographic is a function not just of jerkdom’s prevalence (p) within the demographic, but also its significance (s) to the larger population. TJ = p*s. Even if the level of jerkdom among the rich is equal to or lower than the level in the general population, it will still have more malign effects, because, as the research above shows, the preferences of rich people have extremely high significance (s) value for US governance. In fact, they appear to be the only preferences that have any significance at all.

In short, rich people, qua demographic, have high jerkdom (p) and (s) values and thus uniquely high TJ. In other words, rich people are jerks.

WATCH: How the rich stole the recovery in one chart

The wealthy are wealthy because they OWN the non-humans means of production and have rigged the system for their benefit by  hiring all the lobbyist that create the financial mechanisms that continuously concentrate wealth-creating, income-producing capital asset OWNERSHIP among themselves and fix the tax loopholes and deductions which make the rich richer. Warren Buffett is clearly no progressive thinker.

Abraham Lincoln said that the purpose of government is to do for people what they cannot do for themselves. Government also should serve to keep people from hurting themselves and to restrain man’s greed, which otherwise cannot be self-controlled. Anyone who seeks to own productive power that they cannot or won’t use for consumption are beggaring their neighbor––the equivalency of mass murder––the impact of concentrated capital ownership.

There is clearly an inherent “hoggism” that our economic system creates and perpetuates.  The 99 percent are essentially work slaves. Only the people who already own productive capital are the beneficiaries of their work, as they systematically concentrate more and more capital ownership in their stationary 1 percent ranks. This has resulted in a oligarchic society in which the 99 percent are utterly powerless as power is vested in those who OWN productive capital.

The system does not fully facilitate connecting the majority of citizens, who have unsatisfied needs and wants, to the productive capital assets enabling productive efficiency and economic growth.

Binary economist Louis Kelso said, “We are a nation of industrial sharecroppers who work for somebody else and have no other source of income. If a man owns something that will produce a second income, he’ll be a better customer for the things that American industry produces. But the problem is how to get the working man [and woman] that second income.”

As long as working people are limited by earning income solely through their labor worker wages, they will be left behind by the continued gravitation of economic bounty toward the top 1 percent of the people that the system is rigged to benefit. Working people and the middle class will continue to stagnate, resulting in a stagnated consumer economy. More troubling is that this continued stagnation will further dim the economic hopes of America’s youth, no matter what their education level. The result will have profound long-term consequences for the nation’s economic health and further limit equal earning opportunity and spread income inequality. As the need for labor decreases and the power and leverage of productive capital increases, the gap between labor workers and capital owners will increase, which will result in turmoil and upheaval, if not revolution.

Kelsonian binary economics and the various credit mechanisms derived from its understanding are not “socialist” or “communist” solutions but are based on the principles and dynamics of a free market economy. When understood, the current system is exposed as a system rigged to continually concentrate the ownership of capital in the 1 to 5 percent of the population. Also exposed are the dire moral implications of the current system, which is presently propelled by greed in our society. A new system that would ensure equal opportunity for every child, woman, and man to acquire productive capital with the earnings of capital and broaden its ownership universally does not require people to be any better than they presently are, but it does enable our society to leverage both greed and generosity in a way that honestly recognizes and harnesses productive capital as the factor that exponentially produces the wealth in a technologically advanced society.

The resulting impact of our current approaches has been plutocratic government and concentration of capital ownership, which denies every citizen his or her pursuit of economic happiness (property). Market-sourced income (through concentrated capital ownership) has concentrated in individuals and families who will not recycle it back through the market as payment for consumer products and services. They already have most of what they want and need so they invest their excess in new productive power, making them richer and richer through greater capital ownership. This is the source of the distributional bottleneck that makes the private property, market economy ever more dysfunctional. The symptoms of dysfunction are capital ownership concentration and inadequate consumer demand, the effects of which translate into poverty and economic insecurity for the 99 percent majority of people who depend entirely on wages from their labor or welfare and cannot survive more than a week or two without a paycheck. The production side of the economy is under-nourished and hobbled as a result.

While Americans believe in political democracy, political democracy will not work without a property-based free market system of economic democracy. The system is the problem, but it can and must be overhauled. The two prerequisites are political power, which is the power to make, interpret, administer, and enforce laws, and economic power, the power to produce products and services, whether through labor power or productive capital.

Kelso wrote: “In the distribution of social power, whether it be political power or economic power, all things are relative. The essence of economic democracy lies in the elimination of differences of earning power resulting from denial of equality of economic opportunity, particularly equal access to capital credit. Differences of economic status resulting from differences in advantages taken and uses made of differences based on inequality of economic opportunity, particularly those that give access to capital credit to the already capitalized and deny it to the non- or -undercapitalized, are flagrant violations of the constitutional rights of citizens in a democracy.”

There are policies that can be adopted and executed to reverse the ultimate direction of collapse of the American market economy system. Such policies are based on the recognition that as the production of products and services changes from labor intensive to capital intensive, the way in which every human being––not just a few, but every person––earns his or her income must change in the same way. At the core of this quiet revolution is the understanding and commitment to broadening the ownership of productive capital.

Unfortunately, pursuing economic democracy has been frustrated by the systemic concentration of economic power and exclusionary access to future capital credit to the advantage of the wealthiest Americans. The so-called 1 percent rulers of corporations have rigged the financial system to enable this already rich ownership class to systematically further enrich themselves as capital formation occurs and technological industrialization spreads throughout the world, leaving behind the 99 percent to depend on income redistribution through make work “full employment” policies, government boondoggles, excessive military build-up and dependence on arms production and sales, and social welfare programs due to the lack of an alternative to full employment and the growing economic helplessness and dependency. The unsatisfied needs and wants of society are not in that 1 percent or for that matter the 5 percent; those people are not the ones who are hurting.

Once the national economic policy bases policy decisions on two-factor binary economics, productive capital acquisition would take place through commercially insured capital credit, resulting in a quiet revolution in which economic plutocracy will transform to economic democracy.

The Center For Economic and Social Justice (www.cesj.org) advocates new justice-committed leaders, especially those who want to end the corruption built into our exclusionary system of monopoly capitalism––the main source of corruption of any political system, democratic or otherwise. CESJ advocate the need to radically overhaul the Federal tax system and monetary policies and institute proposals to get money power to the 99 percent of American citizens who now only rely on their labor worker earnings. Under the Just Third Way’s more just and simple tax system, access to ownership of the means of production in the future would by provided to every child, woman and man by requiring the government to lift all existing legal and institutional barriers to private property stakes as a fundamental human right. The system was made by people and can be changed by people. Guided by the right principles of economic justice, “we the people” can organize and demand that the system be reorganized to make true economic democracy the new foundation for true political democracy. The result of this movement of new justice-committed leaders and activists will be inclusive prosperity, inclusive opportunity, and inclusive economic justice.

The following is proposed:

• Eliminate all tax loopholes and subsidies,
• Provide an exemption of $100,000 for a family of four to meet their ordinary living needs,
• Encourage corporations to pay out all their profits as taxable personal incomes to avoid paying corporate income taxes and to finance their growth by issuing new full-voting, full-dividend payout shares for broad-based citizen ownership,
• Eliminate the payroll tax on workers and their employers, but
• Pay out of general revenues for all promises for Social Security, Medicare, government pensions, health, education, rent and subsistence vouchers for the poor until their new jobs and ownership accumulations provide new incomes to substitute for the taxpayer dollars to fill these needs.
• The tax rate would be a single rate for all incomes from all sources above the personal exemption levels so that the budget could be balanced automatically and even allow the government to pay off the growing unsustainable long-term debt, but the poor would pay the first dollar over their exemption levels as would the hedge fund operator and others now earning billions of dollars from capital gains, dividends, rents and other property incomes which under some tax proposals would be exempted from any taxes.
• As a substitute for inheritance and gift taxes, a transfer tax would be imposed on the recipients whose holdings exceeded $1 million, thus encouraging the super-rich to spread out their monopoly-sized estates to all members of their family, friends, servants and workers who helped create their fortunes, teachers, health workers, police, other public servants, military veterans, artists, the poor and the disabled.
• The Federal Reserve would stop monetizing unproductive debt, including bailouts of banks “too big to fail” and Wall Street derivatives speculators, and
• Begin creating an asset-backed currency that could enable every child, woman and man to establish a Capital Homestead Account or “CHA” (a super-IRA or asset tax-shelter for citizens) at their local bank to purposely acquire a growing dividend-bearing stock portfolio to supplement their incomes from work and all other sources of income.
• The CHA would process an equal allocation of productive credit to every citizen exclusively for purchasing full-dividend payout shares in companies needing funds for growing the economy and private sector jobs for local, national and global markets.
• The shares would be purchased using interest-free credit wholly backed by projected “future savings” in the form of new productive capital assets as well as the future marketable goods and services produced by the added technology, renewable energy systems, manufacturing factories, rentable space for entrepreneurial endeavor and infrastructure, both repair and new, added to the economy.
• Risk of default on each stock acquisition loan would be covered by private sector capital credit risk insurance and reinsurance, but
• Would not require citizens to reduce their funds for consumption to purchase shares.

The end result is that citizens would become empowered as owners to meet their own consumption needs and government would become more dependent on economically independent citizens, thus reversing current global trends where all citizens will eventually become dependent for their economic well-being on our only legitimate social monopoly –– the State –– and whatever elite controls the coercive powers of government.

Any justice-minded person should be angry at the system and want to reform the system, but as well there are wealthy capital owners, such as Warren Buffett, who have been able to enrich themselves and have not lifted a finger to acknowledge that they are rich because they own wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets. Nor have they not spoken out about broadening capital ownership.

Those who are overwhelmingly benefiting from the current unjust system, such as Warren Buffett and others, should be shamed for hogging capital ownership and not seeking to lift ownership-concentrating Federal Reserve System credit barriers and other institutional barriers that have historically separated owners from non-owners and link tax and monetary reforms to the goal of expanded capital ownership. Doing so would enable the poor and others with no or few assets (the 99 percenters) to overcome the collateralization barrier that excludes the non-halves from access to productive capital.