My problem with your post is that it’s about what happened, not who “they” are.

there are real people making the major decisions, with real thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and values. — Xtrix

it's worth understanding exactly who they are. — Xtrix

I put up some comments about who I think these people are, that is, what drives them, why do they do it, etc.? I also put up some thoughts on what doesn’t reflect well on them.

These were ignored then finally addressed as fabrications. So I put up some research about these people. That was also ignored. Then up put up some reference to three wealthy people who did not inherit wealth but worked hard to make it. Also ignored.

I understand a lot of this, people despise these people and regard Capitalism as criminal. Fine. But it’s convenient to ignore my posts about these people to bolster their position. Which is not what you’d expect on a philosophy forum. But still that’s how it is these days. I don’t mind, but don’t expect me to accept groundless assertions based on prejudices.

. I expect that rich people tend to be just like anybody else would be if they were rich, because it’s not being the way that they are that made them rich, but being rich that made them the way that they are. — Pfhorrest

I think it might be a little of both. People like Gates, Bezos, and Jack Ma were each lucky, but they certainly knew what to do with their luck.

But then I think about ex-gang members who talk about how a gang systematically transforms a normal kid into a monster. I think people on the second tier of fortune might be a little like that: trapped by their own ambition.

But if there is some similarity or blind fusion of global agenda, is it human nature or today's culture?

Wouldn't the answer to that bear on whether there's no any point in being leftist?

Wouldn't the answer to that bear on whether there's no any point in being leftist? — frank

Can you elaborate on that?

Beyond the statistical answer reached by listing all living human beings sorted by net worth in descending order and filtering out the random percentile of 99% who sure wish to hold on to what they have- and yes perhaps even make long term plans to ensure they keep what they have and yeah maybe earn more- like every other human being on Earth does, the answer is simple: imaginary boogeymen.

No human being alive here on Earth today really did much more than crawl out of their mother. Sure, some did so as billionaires, some average, some dirt poor. There's really nothing mysterious or conspiratorial about it.

Or... maybe there is. Perhaps they sold their soul to the devil or are aliens/inter-dimensional beings in disguise or something. *whistles X-files theme*

I think people on the second tier of fortune might be a little like that: trapped by their own ambition. — frank

That’s interesting. Though it might be seen by some as making excuses for the behaviour of the wealthy.

Can you elaborate on that? — Brett

I think most of us would agree that the global scene is something that evolved naturally. We're all products of it, so in a sense we're all dependent on the 1% as much as they're dependent on us. We're each unique faces of a single global entity.

If this system is an expression of human nature, perhaps dreaming of some alternative is useless. But if it's our present culture, we might be able to change things.

What do you think?

That’s interesting. Though it might be seen by some as making excuses for the behaviour of the wealthy. — Brett

In what context do we give a shit how it's seen by some?

What do you think? — frank

I think it’s possible that Capitalism has served its purpose. It pulled a lot of people out of poverty, but now it’s like some top heavy dinosaur that crashes around crushing everything underfoot. The desire for Socialism is understandable but that too has failed to offer a real alternative to Capitalism. Where do we go from here? Do we just have to wrestle with our circumstances until something workable evolves out of it, just as it has in the past? Strangely enough I do have faith in us finding a way through this.

In what context do we give a shit how it's seen by some? — frank

I’m not sure what you mean.

The desire for Socialism is understandable but that too has failed to offer a real alternative to Capitalism. — Brett

The problem here is failing to distinguish a free market from capitalism, and a command economy from socialism.

Free markets have helped pull people out of poverty. Command economies have failed. But capitalism, which has thus far always accompanied free markets, has also failed. What's left out of the combinations of those possibilities that we haven't really tried? Market socialism.

So let's try that. Free markets with no capitalism. Socialism with no command economy.

Imagine if there was a way out of this. What sort of people do you think might make it happen, maybe people who are conscientious, extroverts, innovative, more emotionally stable, and get joy in what they do.

Well, I didn't ignore your posts. It's just that The Who's Who of capitalism is a long list, and covers a few centuries. You or I or Joe Blow can list a batch of very rich people, the 1%, and what they did / how they did it. Whether the 1% are 'good people' or hideous gargoyles would require a lot of individual biography, since having a lot of money alone wouldn't make one necessarily good or bad. Carnegie might have been a harsh employer, but he was a good philanthropist. I regularly used the Carnegie library in our small town when I was growing up. Henry Ford was richer than Carnegie; he might have been a better employer than Carnegie, but he was a vicious antisemite.

Well there is obviously an evolutionary path there, things blossom then they die away. However I don’t see any market, even a free market, happening without a particular individual to drive it. Maybe it’s possible. But I’d like to know if you think that the free market and Capitalism evolved together at the same time or whether the free market existed first. Because if it did and Capitalism evolved from it then aren’t we destined to go in a circle again.

Where do we go from here? Do we just have to wrestle with our circumstances until something workable evolves out of it, just as it has in the past? Strangely enough I do have faith in us finding a way through this. — Brett

We will find a way. We'll respond to natural events with ingenuity and grace. Mostly.

Imagine if there was a was out of this. What sort of people do you think might make it happen, maybe people who are conscientious, extroverts, innovative, more emotionally stable, and get joy in what they do. — Brett

It takes all kinds. Big events are produced by hundreds of millions of people.

With everything you do, everything you say, even everything you think, you're contributing to large scale success, or large scale disaster. Your actions are like pebbles dropped into a pond, sending ripples out through time and space.

Just one smile at someone who's hurting could set events in motion that will roll out over the world and into the future for centuries.

We will find a way. — frank

So you have faith in human nature.

So you have faith in human nature — Brett

You could put it that way.

But I’d like to know if you think that the free market and Capitalism evolved together at the same time or whether the free market existed first. — Brett

I think capitalism is the last vestiges of feudalism still clinging to the freer markets enabled by a post-agrarian economy. There has always been a struggle between freedom and authority, and I don’t think there is any teleological path that history has to go in: there have always been free markets, there have aways been people trying one way or another to seize control for themselves, and that battle can go either way depending on what we the people oppose or support.

Just one smile at someone who's hurting could set events in motion that will roll out over the world and into the future for centuries. — frank

Apparently he also believes in smiling butterflies whose flapping wings cause an outbreak of lovely summer weather. An optimistic fellow. Smiling at the old woman lying in the street who just got run over by a bicycle will surely ripple out to the 24th century.

The whole problem with the current discussion is in trying to cash out the OPs question in terms of personality traits or personal psychology - it’s an utterly inane effort, first because outside of population-level studies it’s entirely speculative (in Bretts case just pulling shit out of his arse), and second, well - the global 1% holds approximately half of the worlds total wealth. If anyone thinks that this can be accounted for in terms of psychology, they ought to go back to elementary school and re-learn how the universe functions. As the meme goes: have you ever considered the possibility that Jeff Bezos just works 184 billion times harder than you? It’s just fucking absurd to even think about it in these ‘personalistic’ terms.

No amount of personality quirk is going to explain the accrual of wealth on that scale upwards: any even half-adequate explanation can only be structural, needing to account for how it is anyone at all could occupy that kind of position in society. The enabling conditions of such disparity are sociological and political in the first instance, and psychological at a point at which no one should give a shit anymore other than just a just-so story. If the 1% are parasites, it is not because they have any kind of behavioural disposition of any sort: they are parasites by virtue of their occupying a structural position in society with disparity as it is. The most lovely, talented, hard-working, virtuous, kind, and giving person could belong to this class: they would still be a fucking parasite insofar as their wealth would objectively be built off the backs of others.

That's largely what I've been trying to say in this thread as well. My expectation is that the 1% are ordinary people as far as psychology goes. Unlike what Brett seems to think, I don't get the impression that anyone here is saying that the 1% got where they are by being evil. They just didn't get there by being some kind of special super-hardworking genius either.

My expectation is that the 1% are ordinary people as far as psychology goes. — Pfhorrest

I mostly agree. I did very much like this tendency chart that was doing the rounds a while ago though - it's from Ruby Payne's A Framework for Understanding Poverty, and which I found struck quite close to home:



These broad-stroke correlations of course need to be understood as an etiology that moves from social position to behavioural tendency and not the other way around.

So circling back to rephrase my original question: what are the people like who have benefited most from such a system? — Xtrix

In general? Hard to say. There are characteristics that may well apply to people who built fortunes up over time: highly motivated, focussed, maybe type A personalities; people who require large material rewards for their efforts. If they built a fortune they probably have insight into where opportunity is before it knocks on the door, or they recognize an opportunity when they see it. If they are good at it, they probably don't dither.

People who inherit a large amount of money may not resemble people who built up companies. They may or may not have entrepreneurial skills.

Are they the sort of person one would like to go drinking with? Quite likely--but don't let them get away without paying. But one impression I have of people with substantial wealth is that they tend to have their radar up for threats to their social, financial, political status quo. After all, their wealth may be threatened in the event of social turmoil, or they may at least be inconvenienced. If they feel entitled to deference, they won't take inconvenience lightly.

My expectation is that the 1% are ordinary people as far as psychology goes. Unlike what Brett seems to think, I don't get the impression that anyone here is saying that the 1% got where they are by being evil. They just didn't get there by being some kind of special super-hardworking genius either.
1h — Pfhorrest

My posts have been made to try and demonstrate what these people might be about. I haven’t tried to say that they’re better than us, nor that they’re parasites or sociopaths, as some have done.

I didn’t pose the question I just responded to it. I did make the point that not all the wealthy inherited money, which is true and I posted evidence for that.

They’re are probably many people who have the same traits who don’t take part in the corporate world, NGO’s for instance. I’m not saying they’re the only ones who have these traits.

If you think that they have the same psychology as us and you think they’re parasites and sociopaths then I guess you would have to say that wealth turned them, because you can’t see how anyone like us could make all that money. And the answer to why we the ordinary person can’t make that money us because we weren’t lucky enough to inherit wealth, which is not always the case as I tried to show.

Of course you can’t make that sort of wealth merely by working long hours. It requires something more, which not all of us have or even care about.

The problem here is failing to distinguish a free market from capitalism, and a command economy from socialism. — Pfhorrest

So, according to you, is a "free market" an unregulated market? Is there ownership of property in your model? What does your notion of a free market look like?

It's also a psychological issue. Despite diminishing marginal utility, why do billionaires spend so much of their time on work? Yes, they may not work hard as a slave on a fishing boat off the coast of SouthEast Asia, but they do spend many hours a day on work. Why bother running your company and attending Wall Street meetings? Why not just permanently retire after you accumulate your first 50 million in the bank and enjoy the rest of your decades on Earth on your hobbies or something? For most citizens who work because they want to satisfy a certain level of consumption and leisure, it's difficult to fathom the pointless but enormous amount of time and energy spent on making more money.

The reason is that once you're that rich, accumulation of money becomes about status competition. Conspicuous consumption is a kind of addiction. Being very rich is not just bad for everyone else, it's also bad for rich people themselves. Being very rich is inherently a bad thing for human beings. It’s something that society needs to eliminate, just like a disease.

I think the economic externalities to the rest of society is the main reason why we shouldn't allow concentrated wealth to exist, but I think it's a worthwhile additional critique.

There is much to suggest that the psychology of rich people are different:

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/does_wealth_reduce_compassion

https://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/12/the-rich-drive-differently-a-study-suggests/

Sure, but precisely to the degree that these trends hold across the class is prima facie evidence that the drivers for them are sociological - that is, interpersonal and contexual - and not 'psychological' and individual. To the degree that psychology has anything to do with it, it would be in a derivative or secondary capacity.

That said, you're still describing intra-class behaviour - what happens, as it were, once you 'get there'. I suppose that goes some way to answering the OP, but considering the capitalist tendency to isolate, atomize, and psychologize - exemplified by people like Brett - every effort should be made to foreground exactly the opposite of that.

Also, to add to your links - the rich are more likely to be narcissists: "Those with more highly educated and wealthier parents remained higher in their self-reported entitlement and narcissistic characteristics. “That would suggest that it’s not just [that] people who feel entitled are more likely to become wealthy,” says Piff. Wealth, in other words, may breed narcissistic tendencies — and wealthy people justify their excess by convincing themselves that they are more deserving of it."

https://healthland.time.com/2013/08/20/wealthy-selfies-how-being-rich-increases-narcissism/

If you think that they have the same psychology as us and you think they’re parasites and sociopaths then I guess you would have to say that wealth turned them, because you can’t see how anyone like us could make all that money. — Brett

This misses the point. Even now that they're rich, I don't expect that they're statistically very different from people who aren't rich, psychologically. It's not like being rich "turned" them. The things that they do are the same things that most ordinary people would do in their position. Even the bad things. Because people in general are not shining bastions of morality, but will exploit a situation to their benefit when given the chance, even at someone else's expense, and then try to rationalize away why what they're doing is perfectly fine.

What's bad is that we systemically, as a culture, give some people that chance, and internalize those rationalizations, and act like everything's fine.

The problem is not some people just choosing to be evil because they're bad people, not even because wealth made them bad people or anything like that. The problem is a social structure that gives some people the opportunity to live the high life at the expense of others, and gives those others almost no opportunity to escape that, and then praises or blames people for their position in that hierarchy as though they got there by choice and merit alone.

So, according to you, is a "free market" an unregulated market? Is there ownership of property in your model? What does your notion of a free market look like? — Janus

To have a market at all requires that people have claims (first-order passive rights) to property, and powers (second-order active rights) to trade those claims with each other.

To have freedom in general requires that people have liberties (first-order active rights; limits on others' claims) and immunities (second-order passive rights; limits on others' powers).

Freedom of a market is especially about immunity against anyone else but you transferring your claims to anyone else; that's the usual sense of "unregulated" that's meant when most people talk about free markets.

The absence of such immunities is the cornerstone of a command economy, where someone else can order you to sell something and tell you what you may get in exchange for it.

Capitalism vs socialism has nothing to do with any of these kinds of rights in general, but only with how the specific instances of claims to property are distributed. When they're concentrated in few hands, you have capitalism. When they're spread across many hands, you have socialism.

Since claims are limits on others' liberties, having claims concentrated in few hands (capitalism) gives those few people vast liberties at the expense of limiting everyone else's liberties, while having claims spread across many hands (socialism) provides equal liberty to all.

The thing that I think leads to the rise of capitalism, even in a nominally "free" market, is the absence of certain immunities (and so the absence of a certain kind of freedom), or conversely the presence of certain kinds of powers, to contract; especially contracts of rent and interest.

I went into greater detail on why earlier in this very thread:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/476042

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/476855

Because people in general are not shining bastions of morality, but will exploit a situation to their benefit when given the chance, even at someone else's expense, and then try to rationalize away why what they're doing is perfectly fine.

What's bad is that we systemically, as a culture, give some people that chance, and internalize those rationalizations, and act like everything's fine. — Pfhorrest

Yes I’d agree with you there.

The problem is that “ we systemically, as a culture, give some people that chance, and internalize those rationalizations, and act like everything's fine.” Why do we, did we, give some people that chance, and who is “we” anyway. Capitalism wasn’t introduced from another planet. Someone, maybe Merlot- Ponty, said that Capitalism succeeds because it turns part of our nature into a benefit. I guess that part of our nature he means is the desire to own things, to possess things, to buy things.

This is the problem. Not the individuals themselves, even though they may not be the most desirable people. Like I said, maybe we’ve reached the-use by date for Capitalism.

Edit: more likely Raymond Aron.

I think you're over-complicating the issue with technical jargon. You say you're against rent; but if you're not against people accumulating property, and you are against government regulation (command economy), what's to stop owners from renting their property?