Being very wealthy is bad for you

My partner and I have had a long-standing disagreement when it comes to wealth inequality: she has always argued that the ceiling should be lower, i.e. people should not be allowed to be that rich and use that to raise the bottom; whereas I have always argued that I don’t care about the ceiling, the floor should be higher, i.e. nobody should be very poor. But now I believe that she was right all along¹. So, what changed my mind?

For context, I believe that the best part of capitalism is that people have a reasonable chance to be rewarded for bringing value into the world, whether that’s through competence and excellence or original ideas. Unfortunately, it doesn’t reward these consistently, and it rewards plenty of terrible behaviors just as much or even more; these I consider failures of the system. (There are many caveats and sides of this argument, and I’m happy to concede that capitalism is a shit system, but I still believe that it’s the best system we’ve had so far in the history, because you have much better chance to be rewarded in it than in any other socioeconomic system we’ve tried.)

How do you get rewarded? Well, with money, that you can exchange for goods and services. Money is commodified power: it allows the bearer to have an impact on the world. In a sense, it’s the purest form of reward, but it could very well be argued that this, in itself, is bad, because individuals should have limited control over the world around them. Which is the same argument we’re discussing, just in a different perspective.

But even if money is not inherently problematic: how about too much of it? We all know the saying “money doesn’t buy happiness”, which – while true – is unhelpful, because a lack of money does ‘buy’ unhappiness. Nonetheless, there’s a huge amount of difference in being a millionaire (rich by almost everybody’s standard) and a billionaire, and I suppose now: a trillionaire. As the common observation goes: “The difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is roughly a billion dollars.” Being rich, and being uber-rich are very different stories. This is about the latter.

What ended up reframing this question in mind is this video, which argues convincingly that being rich is bad for you as a human being, citing psychology research:

The video is short (less than 10 minutes), and well-worth watching in full. But the key part, I believe:

It’s in how you treat the people around you. […] Picture a ladder with wealth at the top. The higher you climb, the more entitlement and self-interest go up, and the more compassion and empathy go down.

Why?

When given a sense of power, even in a lab, even just by writing about a time they had control over someone else, the activity in the mirror neuron system (that forms the basis of our empathy), drops.

This, oddly, makes sense. Having power makes you less reliant on others. What you’re not reliant on, matters less. So, if you’re not so reliant on others, it stops mattering quite so much what they feel or think. We know that the human body, even our brain is a “use it or lose it” system: if you’re powerful, your brain correctly decides to stop wasting energy on the irrelevant, such as other human beings. It’s like acquired sociopathy.

And, towards the end of the video:

[…] a bubble where consequences stop being real.

This, to me, is where things break completely. It’s one thing to not have to worry about money: whether you pay rent, or pay the hospital if you need an urgent surgery, or buy food. It’s a completely different thing to not have to worry about consequences: a person who faces no consequences for their actions stops being a member of society, and starts being more like a ruler of that society, in a way in an even purer form than kings in kingdoms, because kings could and sometimes did get deposed. Billionaires… not so much.

I believe that this kind of extreme wealth is bad both for society and for the person itself. Why would it be bad for the person? Well, everything that we know about happiness and contentment is that it centers around being connected to other people and being needed. Much meaning in our lives is derived from being social. Watching a movie alone is cheap entertainment. Watching that movie together with others, experiencing and discussing it tends to be a much more rewarding and meaningful activity.

If even just a fraction of the psychology research cited in the above video is true, being extremely wealthy damages your ability to connect to people, and so in a very real way damages your ability to be happy. There is something deeply sad about society’s own reward system becoming actively harmful not just for the society, but even for the rewarded person themselves.

So no, we should not have billionaires.