The Despair of Millionaires
Poverty … is the invention of civilization.
MARSHALL SAHLINS
A recent New York Times article under the headline “In Silicon Valley, Millionaires Who Don’t Feel Rich” begins, “By almost any definition—except his own and perhaps those of his neighbors here in Silicon Valley—Hal Steger has it made.” The article notes that although Mr. Steger and his wife have a net worth of roughly $3.5 million, he still typically works twelve-hour days plus another ten hours on weekends. “A few million,” explains Steger, “doesn’t go as far as it used to.”
Gary Kremen (estimated net worth: $10 million), founder of Match.com, an online dating service, explains, “Everyone around here looks at the people above them.” He continues to work sixty to eighty hours per week because, he says, “You’re nobody here at $10 million.” Another executive gets right to the point, saying, “Here, the top 1 percent chases the top one-tenth of 1 percent, and the top one-tenth of 1 percent chases the top one-one-hundredth of 1 percent.”17
This sort of thinking isn’t limited to Silicon Valley. A BBC report from September 2003 reported, “Well-off is the new poor.” Dr. Clive Hamilton, a visiting scholar at Cambridge University, set out to study the “suffering rich” and found that four of every ten people earning over £50,000 (roughly $80,000 at the time) felt “deprived.” Hamilton concluded, “The real concerns of yesterday’s poor have become the
imagined concerns of today’s rich.” Another recent survey in the United States found that 45 percent of those with a net worth (excluding their home) over $1 million were worried about running out of money before they died. Over one-third of those with more than $5 million had the same concern.18
“Affluenza” (a.k.a. luxury fever) is not an eternal affliction of the human animal, as some would have us believe. It is an effect of wealth disparities that arose with agriculture. Still, even in modern societies, we sometimes find echoes of the ancient egalitarianism of our ancestors.
In the early 1960s, a physician named Stewart Wolf heard about a town of Italian immigrants and their descendants in northeast Pennsylvania where heart disease was practically unknown. Wolf decided to take a closer look at the town, Roseto. He found that almost no one under age fifty-five showed symptoms of heart disease. Men over sixty-five suffered about half the number of heart problems expected of average Americans. The overall death rate in Roseto was about one-third below national averages.
After conducting research that carefully excluded factors such as exercise, diet, and regional variables like pollution levels, Wolf and sociologist John Bruhn concluded that the major factor keeping folks in Roseto healthier longer was the nature of the community itself. They noted that most households held three generations, that older folks commanded great respect, and that the community disdained any display of wealth, showing a “fear of ostentation derived from an ancient belief among Italian villagers relating to maloccio (the evil eye). Children,” Wolf wrote, “were taught that any display of wealth or superiority over a neighbor would bring bad luck.”
Noting that Roseto’s egalitarian social bonds were already breaking down in the mid-1960s, Wolf and Bruhn predicted that within a generation, the town’s mortality rates would start to shift upward. In follow-up studies they conducted 25 years later, they reported, “The most striking social change was a widespread rejection of a long standing taboo against ostentation,” and that “sharing, once typical of Roseto, had given way to competition.” Rates of both heart disease and stroke had doubled in a generation.19
Among foragers, where property is shared, poverty tends to be a nonissue. In his classic book Stone Age Economics, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins explains that “the world’s most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.”20 Socrates made the same point 2,400 years ago: “He is richest who is content with least, for contentment is the wealth of nature.”
But the wealth of civilization is material. After reading every word of the Old Testament, journalist David Plotz was struck by its mercantile tone. “The overarching theme of the Bible,” he wrote, “particularly of Genesis, is real estate. God is … constantly making land deals (and then remaking them, on different terms)…. It’s not just land that the Bible is obsessed with, but also portable property: gold, silver, livestock.”21
Malthus and Darwin were both struck by the characteristic egalitarianism of foragers, the former writing, “Among most of the American tribes … so great a degree of equality prevailed that all the members of each community would be nearly equal sharers in general hardships of savage life and in the pressure of occasional famines.”22 For his part, Darwin recognized the inherent conflict between the capital-based civilization he knew and what he saw as the natives’ self-defeating generosity, writing, “Nomadic habits, whether over wide plains, or through the dense forests of the tropics, or along the shores of the sea, have in every case been highly detrimental…. The perfect equality of all the inhabitants,” he wrote, “will for many years prevent their civilization.”23