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Why Rich People Hate Talking About Inequality
Why Rich People Hate Talking About Inequality
By Zack Beauchamp
Ed. note: This is the third and final post in a TP Ideas symposium on Branko Milanovic’s The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality. The first installment is here here and the second is here.
The wealthy don’t like it when we talk about it inequality. Mitt Romney famously labeled President Obama’s critique of inequality “class warfare” motivated by “envy,” and proposed instead that debate about economic inequality be confined to “quiet rooms.” It’s fair to say he’s not alone among the super-wealthy in thinking this isn’t a “proper” subject for open, political debate.
At first blush, their motivation here is straightforward: it could cost them money. But given America’s one percent already has so much, and so little redistribution is on the table, they’d have to be exceptionally greedy to have such a strong reaction to even broaching the inequality discussion. Of course that’s possible, but the history of debates around inequality as surveyed in Branko Milanovic’s wonderfully readable book suggests another explanation. The rich don’t like inequality talk because, by its very nature, it involves making moral judgments about the way the rich live their lives into a topic for public discussion.
In the book’s first essay, “Unequal People,” Milanovic runs down the earliest modern economic theories about whether inequality is good for economic growth. The difference between early theories wasn’t, as we think today, whether or not you thought inequality was something that happened as a consequence of a roaring economy: it was whether, essentially, the rich are good people or not.
On the first view, defended to varying degrees by Max Weber and John Maynard Keynes, the rich were virtuous workers, dutiful, acquisitive folk who accumulated but spent no more on indulgences than the poor....Milanovic’s second view paints a dimmer picture of virtues of the rich. It assumes that the rich are selfish, greedy parasites who hold on to massive hoards and spend on themselves without investing in much of anything socially useful...What’s interesting about both sides of this debate is that they assume a public policy problem (“what grows the economy?”) needs to be discussed in terms of the moral character of the rich. This isn’t because economists have a yen for judging people; rather, it’s that when you have the amount of accumulated capital and power that rich do, the way in which one spend one’s money ends up having an extraordinary impact on everyone else in society. Invariably, assessing the desirability of rich people’s consumption choices will take on a moral cast, as what a person chooses to spend their money on says a lot about the person. Especially when they’re rich enough to spend it on anything.
- more -
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/03/29/1795571/why-rich-people-hate-talking-about-inequality/
By Zack Beauchamp
Ed. note: This is the third and final post in a TP Ideas symposium on Branko Milanovic’s The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality. The first installment is here here and the second is here.
The wealthy don’t like it when we talk about it inequality. Mitt Romney famously labeled President Obama’s critique of inequality “class warfare” motivated by “envy,” and proposed instead that debate about economic inequality be confined to “quiet rooms.” It’s fair to say he’s not alone among the super-wealthy in thinking this isn’t a “proper” subject for open, political debate.
At first blush, their motivation here is straightforward: it could cost them money. But given America’s one percent already has so much, and so little redistribution is on the table, they’d have to be exceptionally greedy to have such a strong reaction to even broaching the inequality discussion. Of course that’s possible, but the history of debates around inequality as surveyed in Branko Milanovic’s wonderfully readable book suggests another explanation. The rich don’t like inequality talk because, by its very nature, it involves making moral judgments about the way the rich live their lives into a topic for public discussion.
In the book’s first essay, “Unequal People,” Milanovic runs down the earliest modern economic theories about whether inequality is good for economic growth. The difference between early theories wasn’t, as we think today, whether or not you thought inequality was something that happened as a consequence of a roaring economy: it was whether, essentially, the rich are good people or not.
On the first view, defended to varying degrees by Max Weber and John Maynard Keynes, the rich were virtuous workers, dutiful, acquisitive folk who accumulated but spent no more on indulgences than the poor....Milanovic’s second view paints a dimmer picture of virtues of the rich. It assumes that the rich are selfish, greedy parasites who hold on to massive hoards and spend on themselves without investing in much of anything socially useful...What’s interesting about both sides of this debate is that they assume a public policy problem (“what grows the economy?”) needs to be discussed in terms of the moral character of the rich. This isn’t because economists have a yen for judging people; rather, it’s that when you have the amount of accumulated capital and power that rich do, the way in which one spend one’s money ends up having an extraordinary impact on everyone else in society. Invariably, assessing the desirability of rich people’s consumption choices will take on a moral cast, as what a person chooses to spend their money on says a lot about the person. Especially when they’re rich enough to spend it on anything.
- more -
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/03/29/1795571/why-rich-people-hate-talking-about-inequality/
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