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Comment by PhisherPrice | Hacker News Reader

Rich people are assholes in my experience. They may have better manners and stuff, but their intentions are evil. A lot of the time, their interests directly conflict with the interests of the middle class.

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You probably have a significant selection effect in play there. You would not notice the rich people you've encountered who were perfectly polite to you and did not have ostentatious displays of wealth that clearly labeled them as rich.

You may also be surprised to discover that the "rich asshole" who ducks into the spot in front of you with his Ferrari and then tells you off with his vigorously waving arms decorated with a Rolex could be entirely faking it, actually hip deep in debt and not able to afford what he's waving around. Unsurprisingly such people are often quite stressed. (I don't know "that guy" but I know some people who certainly trend in that direction and I believe would have required only small life pushes to be "that guy".)

Is your hypothesis that wealth turns people into assholes, or that only assholes are capable of generating vast amounts of personal wealth?

>Rich people are assholes in my experience. They may have better manners and stuff, but their intentions are evil

I'd keep that attitude in check, if you are in a western nation you are likely in the top 1% - 2% in terms of income globally. Things would end pretty badly for you if 98% of the planet decided people like you are evil.

Sometimes I think we Western people are basically evil, or to be more precise, willfully ignorant. We live in our sheltered world eating organic food thinking about how good we are for drinking "fair coffee". At the same time a lot of our companies are polluting the third world and exploiting poor workers there. We finance civil wars often for economic benefit and destabilize countries.

So I wouldn't be surprised if one day the global poor would say "enough is enough".

Just remember that the difference is in circumstances, not humanity: it’s not westerners who suck, its a majority of people. Whoever is on top at the time just had the opportunity to hurt the most below.

Who's we? Not everyone in the western world is ignorant of their actions externalities

But you have to ignore them. When I look at my lifestyle and its resource consumption it simply is not possible to bring the whole world population to that level. I am aware of that but I still drive my car, fly on vacations and consume a lot of other stuff. I also buy shirts at Walmart although I know that they were probably produced by 12 year old in a sweatshop in Bangladesh.

The 12 year old in a sweatshop in Bangladesh might be supporting a family and may otherwise have to resort to a lower income, starvation, or death without the opportunity Walmart offers.

That's no excuse to make them work in the conditions they have to work. We should be willing to pay more. I know that I am a hypocrite.

That's the thing though. It is extremely unlikely that they are being "MADE" to work. Slavery is essentially outlawed. If you don't provide these people with better, higher paying alternative jobs, then there will be NO JOBS if you ban these.

How about rich countries would accept paying a little more for their stuff?

Why not give to charity? That's what I do.

Paying for a more product produced by more expensive labor makes more sense to me.

Right on! I'm merely apathetic.

I upvoted you because it's a good point, but if you're discussing interpersonal behavior, does it really matter if someone living in poverty in the American deep south is in the top 2% globally for PPP? Studies like this are not looking at the world as a whole, they're looking at interpersonal relationships, by definition very local or regional.

The super wealthy proclaiming without citing evidence that the mega wealthy are evil or cheated somehow is a pet peeve of mine, it just seems petty when you put it into a global context.

Yeah, people were mad at some of my comments during the OWS phase. They were making comments about stuff like hanging and shooting the 1%. I'd point out that, if they were online, in Slashdot or Fark, in a home with regular power, and had clean water, they were quite probably in the world's 1%.

My point wasn't that there was no reason to complain, indeed there are many reasons to complain. My point was that making generalizations and threats based on an arbitrary number wasn't very productive or honest.

But maybe the effect actually works in a local context. People probably measure wealth relatively to their peers, not on a global scale.

My point was specifically that a global context doesn't make sense here.

Two wrongs don’t make a right. Excusing greedy behavior won’t make it right, ever.

Lets say you work hard and with some savings you go ahead and buy an iPhone, that iPhone is produced by workers in the third world who make much less than you and costs much more than they will make in a month.

Now lets say we add a few zeros to your income to move you from the top 1% globally to the top .1%. Jobs that pay this kind of money are difficult, so you work really hard as well. Instead of an iPhone made in the third world you buy a yacht or sports car made in the first. The first world workers make much less than you do, but have a pretty good standard of living globally speaking (but not compared to you).

What is fundamentally different about those two cases? Can it really be said with a straight face that one is greedier than the other? In fact, it seems the "wealthy" person actually created better outcomes for the people creating his luxury product as compared to the first example.

This is a glass house sort of situation when you really consider it.

And the intentions of the middle-class directly conflict with the intentions of the poor.

Middle-class is definitely the worst. Enough power to be harmful to the poor, but not enough self-awareness of their own situation.

They're the slave-drivers the wealthy use to whip the slaves.

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