Why Petulant Oligarchs Rule Our World

[cigaretteman]

By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist
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Some years ago — I think it was 2015 — I got a quick lesson in how easy it is to become a horrible person. I was a featured speaker at a conference in São Paulo, Brazil, and my arrival flight was badly delayed. The organizers, worried that I would miss my slot thanks to the city’s notorious traffic, arranged to have me met at the airport and flown directly to the hotel’s roof by helicopter.
Then, when the conference was over, there was a car waiting to take me back to the airport. And just for a minute I found myself thinking, “What? I have to take a car?”
By the way, in real life I mostly get around on the subway.
Anyway, the lesson I took from my moment of pettiness was that privilege corrupts, that it very easily breeds a sense of entitlement. And surely, to paraphrase Lord Acton, enormous privilege corrupts enormously, in part because the very privileged are normally surrounded by people who would never dare tell them that they’re behaving badly.
That’s why I’m not shocked by the spectacle of Elon Musk’s reputational self-immolation. Fascinated, yes; who isn’t? But when an immensely rich man, accustomed not just to getting whatever he wants but also to being a much-admired icon, finds himself not just losing his aura but becoming a subject of widespread ridicule, of course he lashes out erratically, and in so doing makes his problems even worse.
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The more interesting question is why we’re now ruled by such people. For we’re clearly living in the age of the petulant oligarch.
As The Times’s Kevin Roose recently pointed out, Musk still has many admirers in the technology world. They see him not as a whiny brat but as someone who understands how the world should be run — an ideology the writer John Ganz calls bossism, a belief that the big people shouldn’t have to answer to, or even face criticism from, the little people. And adherents of that ideology clearly have a lot of power, even if that power doesn’t yet extend to protecting the likes of Musk from getting booed in public.
But how is this possible?
It’s not really a surprise that technological progress and rising gross domestic product haven’t created a happy, equitable society; downbeat visions of the future have been staples of both serious analysis and popular culture for as long as I can remember. But both social critics like John Kenneth Galbraith and speculative writers like William Gibson generally imagined corporatist dystopias that suppressed individuality — not societies dominated by thin-skinned egomaniac plutocrats acting out their insecurities in public view.
So what happened?
Part of the answer, surely, is the sheer scale of wealth concentration at the top. Even before the Twitter fiasco, many people were comparing Elon Musk to Howard Hughes in his declining years. But Hughes’s wealth, even measured in today’s dollars, was trivial compared with Musk’s, even after the recent plunge in Tesla stock. More generally, the best available estimates say that the top 0.00001 percent’s share of total wealth today is almost 10 times what it was four decades ago. And the immense wealth of the modern super-elite has surely brought a lot of power, including the power to act childishly.
Beyond that, many of the superrich, who as a class used to be mostly secretive, have become celebrities instead. The archetype of the innovator who gets rich while changing the world isn’t new; it goes back at least as far as Thomas Edison. But the big fortunes made in information technology turned this narrative into a full-blown cult, with wannabe or seem-to-be Steve Jobs types everywhere you look.
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Indeed, the cult of the genius entrepreneur has played a large role in the rolling debacle that is crypto. Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX wasn’t selling a real product nor, as far as anyone can tell, are those of his former competitors who haven’t yet gone bankrupt: After all this time, nobody has come up with significant real-world uses for cryptocurrency other than money-laundering. What Bankman-Fried was selling, instead, was an image, that of the mussy-haired, scruffily dressed visionary who grasps the future in a way normies can’t.
Elon Musk isn’t in quite the same category. His companies produce cars that actually drive and rockets that actually fly. But the sales and especially the market value of his companies surely depend at least in part on the strength of his personal brand, which he can’t seem to help himself from trashing ever more with each passing day.
In the end, Musk and Bankman-Fried may end up doing a public service, by tarnishing the legend of the genius entrepreneur, which has done a great deal of harm. For now, however, Musk’s Twitter antics are degrading what had become a useful resource, a place some of us went for information from people who actually knew what they were talking about. And a happy ending to this story seems increasingly unlikely.
Oh, and if this column gets me banned from Twitter — or if the site simply dies from mistreatment — you can follow some of what I’m thinking, along with the thoughts of a growing number of Twitter refugees, at Mastodon.

Opinion | Why Petulant Oligarchs Rule Our World

The cult of the genius entrepreneur has done a lot of damage.

www.nytimes.com

 

[What Would Jesus Do?]

privilege corrupts

I really hope "privilege corrupts" catches on.

We were all taught that power corrupts, and we all (I assume) tend to acknowledge that danger. But most people don't have much power, so it seldom hits home as something we should watch out for in our personal lives. And because it's remote, we don't do much about it in politics or business or pretty much anywhere.

Privilege is much closer to home than power. Nearly all Americans are privileged vs most of the rest of the world. Nearly all white Americans are privileged vs non-white Americans. Citizens are privileged vs non-citizens. Healthy vs the infirm. And so on. No, not 100%, but most of us are privileged in many ways vs many others.

How is that corrupting us?

What should we be doing about it?

 

[Colonoscopy]

I really hope "privilege corrupts" catches on.

We were all taught that power corrupts, and we all (I assume) tend to acknowledge that danger. But most people don't have much power, so it seldom hits home as something we should watch out for in our personal lives. And because it's remote, we don't do much about it in politics or business or pretty much anywhere.

Privilege is much closer to home than power. Nearly all Americans are privileged vs most of the rest of the world. Nearly all white Americans are privileged vs non-white Americans. Citizens are privileged vs non-citizens. Healthy vs the infirm. And so on. No, not 100%, but most of us are privileged in many ways vs many others.

How is that corrupting us?

What should we be doing about it?

Why? I don't see good evidence for the thesis that "privilege" corrupts. The article just talks about power. Like... explicitly power.

In and of itself "having it better than" -- this seems to be your working definition of "privilege" -- someone else isn't that meaningful.

And it has existed through all political system through all of time. You see it in the animal kingdom just the same.

 

[What Would Jesus Do?]

Why? I don't see good evidence for the thesis that "privilege" corrupts.

In and of itself "having it better than" -- this seems to be your working definition of "privilege" -- someone else isn't that meaningful.

And it has existed through all political system through all of time. You see it in the animal kingdom just the same.

My admiration of the animal kingdom does not extend to thinking humans should act like animals toward each other.

But I like the way you challenge the concept.

I'm too lazy to debate you right now. Maybe someone else will. Or if enough people agree with you, maybe I'll get up the energy.

That said, I would offer the Right's efforts to prevent teaching the 1619 Project in public schools as an example of privilege corrupts in our culture.

 

[Colonoscopy]

My admiration of the animal kingdom does not extend to thinking humans should act like animals toward each other.

But I like the way you challenge the concept.

I'm too lazy to debate you right now. Maybe someone else will. Or if enough people agree with you, maybe I'll get up the energy.

That said, I would offer the Right's efforts to prevent teaching the 1619 Project in public schools as an example of privilege corrupts in our culture.

Yeah I'm too lazy too.

What I bristled at:

To me, it looked like in the end the article is just pointing to power. Privilege differentials the way they define it are extraordinarily tough eliminate. (enter socialist utopia that's really not easy to get to)

People that have it better are more likely to become powerful and to then have the ability to have great affect. (we hedge our political and economic systems against this... to an extent)

The article's example of Elon Musk didn't make sense from the perspective of privilege or power to me. Bezos, Gates, Jobs etc... did not behave like this. Elon is a one-off weirdo... legitimately may be on the autism spectrum and plays things really differently than we're used to.

With 1619 I don't think it would've ended up making much noise but for its claims about what America is. A book about the horrors of slavery? That had been done.

I think 1619 probably wanted the attention it knew it would get by certain lefty elites and activists by making the audacious claim that the true founding of our country was 1619... and other claims about America's fundamental character that were rather damning.

To be frank... I hate that line of argumentation and get annoyed that so many on the left get caught up in it. They end up being the antithesis to the right when the right claims the true America is essentially "all the good stuff." So the noteworthy thing about 1619 was that stupid debate. The whole enterprise of "America is this" or "America is that" is rather stupid. I never thought of America that way.

 

[Colonoscopy]

privilege corrupts, that it very easily breeds a sense of entitlement

Even this I question. Entitlement... you have people at the low-end of socio-economic spectrum that act like complete assholes when an expectation they have of society isn't met. But it's usually throwing a temper tantrum at walmart or at a drive-through.

What we're seeing is probably just the response to the violation of an (expected) norm for a given individual. That response is probably moderated quite a bit by the person's personality. (see Bill Gates vs Elon Musk personality wise)

I don't think it is so that those of, say, lower socio-economic stratum are any less assholes than those at the top; however... their deficiencies just aren't as meaningful to the public because they don't hold as much power.

Moreso I think the direction I would take this is that it's a problem that society produces people with great power at all.

 

[What Would Jesus Do?]

it's a problem that society produces people with great power at all.

We can agree on that, for sure.