A twitter acquaintance of mine, addressing former Starbucks CEO and presidential aspirant Howard Schultz's complaint that he doesn't like being called a "billionaire," had this pithy response:
And while it's a fine and pithy response, it's also a problem I've wrestled with a lot recently.
Are you familiar with the Prisoner's Dilemma? It goes like this: You and your buddy are arrested and separated. If neither of you confesses, you'll both go to jail for a year on lesser charges. If you confess, you'll go to jail for a year, but your buddy will go for ten years. If he confesses, the sentences will be reversed. If both of you confess, you'll both go to jail for ten years.
The Prisoner's Dilemma is a classic problem because you don't have control over what the other person does. You each hold a weapon you can use on the other, you can't communicate with each other, and if you both use it, you both lose.
Wealthy people are in a Prisoner's Dilemma: there's no way one can merely "disarm," giving away the bulk of their wealth, in a way that will cause the other wealthy people to cease their maladaptive behaviors.
I'm in what you might call the "precarious wealthy"; I have money enough right now, but that could change with a large disaster. I have no passive income sources, and have instead earned my money through the selling of my highly skilled, somewhat rare labor. As I've said before, though, I also believe that my opportunities to earn were highly fortunate, and luck played a huge role in my success. Even if someone points out that I "saw opportunities and exploited them," I'm white and male and secular and code straight, and I had upper-middle-class parents, so I was born with the good fortune to be have access to the opportunity hoard, and to be able to afford the training to do the exploiting.
Like, who can with a straight face claim that, no really, "Porn, video games, and anime" all contributed to my success. (Huh, I don't have a "video games" serendipity entry, but I should: part of the reason Isilon hired me back in 2000 was because I had written a Linux kernel module and so wasn't an idiot about C, or kernel modules, so could be trusted with their BSD-oriented stack. I had written the kernel module because the video game Free Space had been released on open source, but there was no Linux support for my joystick.)
I can't just "give away" my money and then watch the world burn. The best I can do is contribute money, time, and effort to causes I hope will increase legislation to the point where it narrows the income distribution to the point where we're no longer a dysfunctional country.
My ethos is, I hope, one of kindness and the alleviation of cruelty. That's easier to do when you're not worried about how your kids are gonna eat or your partner will get their life-saving medication. I just want it for everyone, not just for myself.
I have an idea for how you could avoid being referred to as a “billionaire”, Howard, but you’re not gonna like it. https://t.co/KbjqMnRGm5
— revolutionary ocelot (@pawcelot) February 5, 2019
And while it's a fine and pithy response, it's also a problem I've wrestled with a lot recently.
Are you familiar with the Prisoner's Dilemma? It goes like this: You and your buddy are arrested and separated. If neither of you confesses, you'll both go to jail for a year on lesser charges. If you confess, you'll go to jail for a year, but your buddy will go for ten years. If he confesses, the sentences will be reversed. If both of you confess, you'll both go to jail for ten years.
The Prisoner's Dilemma is a classic problem because you don't have control over what the other person does. You each hold a weapon you can use on the other, you can't communicate with each other, and if you both use it, you both lose.
Wealthy people are in a Prisoner's Dilemma: there's no way one can merely "disarm," giving away the bulk of their wealth, in a way that will cause the other wealthy people to cease their maladaptive behaviors.
I'm in what you might call the "precarious wealthy"; I have money enough right now, but that could change with a large disaster. I have no passive income sources, and have instead earned my money through the selling of my highly skilled, somewhat rare labor. As I've said before, though, I also believe that my opportunities to earn were highly fortunate, and luck played a huge role in my success. Even if someone points out that I "saw opportunities and exploited them," I'm white and male and secular and code straight, and I had upper-middle-class parents, so I was born with the good fortune to be have access to the opportunity hoard, and to be able to afford the training to do the exploiting.
Like, who can with a straight face claim that, no really, "Porn, video games, and anime" all contributed to my success. (Huh, I don't have a "video games" serendipity entry, but I should: part of the reason Isilon hired me back in 2000 was because I had written a Linux kernel module and so wasn't an idiot about C, or kernel modules, so could be trusted with their BSD-oriented stack. I had written the kernel module because the video game Free Space had been released on open source, but there was no Linux support for my joystick.)
I can't just "give away" my money and then watch the world burn. The best I can do is contribute money, time, and effort to causes I hope will increase legislation to the point where it narrows the income distribution to the point where we're no longer a dysfunctional country.
My ethos is, I hope, one of kindness and the alleviation of cruelty. That's easier to do when you're not worried about how your kids are gonna eat or your partner will get their life-saving medication. I just want it for everyone, not just for myself.
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