Empty Mansions: Don’t be old and rich in New York City
blogs.law.harvard.edu
blogs.law.harvard.edu
In an 1907 essay Mark Twain portrayed Clark as the very embodiment of Gilded Age excess and corruption:
He is as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag; he is a shame to the American nation, and no one has helped to send him to the Senate who did not know that his proper place was the penitentiary, with a ball and chain on his legs. To my mind he is the most disgusting creature that the republic has produced since Tweed's time.[5]
His political failings could be traced back to a socially awkward nature. Politics was messy business back then and it was impossible win a race completely honestly. Nothing he did back then was any worse than what everyone else did.
It even examined Clark's history with Twain and Twain's own relationships with Clark's business rivals. That particular rant was very likely politically motivated.
If you just go by the Golden Rule standard of ethics, W. A. Clark was far more worthy than many of his rivals of his success. Politics, by its very nature, introduces a great number of potential moral pitfalls and there aren't always good and effective approaches to evading them.
you start with the assumption that current politics belongs to the moral group, when it may very well be outside. so by that bad definition you think it is a complex problem.
they got by with the times. got great fortune, brought great misery. like any other "great name". so maybe the concept of great name always having to befit an hero is what is wrong. humans must abandon the hero myth and the desires for immeasurable riches to be able to stand ground on the moral field.
or you could keep the original paradigm and keep debating how to fit your data in the groups forever.
If you can convince most people that your reasons about why stuff happened are valid then you win.
It's like Remembrance Day, no one died for all the horrible shit that happened, only the good stuff.
She was married to the great-great grandson of super-rich John Jacob Astor. I find this to be an interesting example of how long wealth can persist in the US, and a counterexample to the "three generations shirtsleeves-to-shirtsleeves" theory. (As a random aside, her husband's enormously wealthy father died on the Titanic after being denied a lifeboat spot. I find it hard to imagine this happening to the rich and famous today.)
Well, with vastly improved safety regimes in effect across the board, it's difficult to find comparable situations. But you surely won't find third class passenger locked below deck while the upper crust is sauntering into the lifeboats.
The super rich probably doesn't travel on the same vessels as the riff raff at all, but I'm not sure private jets are actually safer than commercial airlines.
> There are some happy parts of the book. Clark uses her fabulous wealth to indulge a taste for the world’s best dollhouses and model Japanese castles, built by craftsmen in Germany and Japan. She pays an assistant to write down transcripts of Flintstone episodes. When she wants to make a little music, she takes a Stradivarius violin out of the closet (first she needs to choose which of her Stradivariuses to play).
Yes, it's horrible that these people took advantage of her, but I find it very difficult to get that worked up over it. On the balance, she still won the cosmic lottery, inheriting a tremendous fortune she did nothing to earn, and getting to spend it on trivialities like dollhouses. Rich heiresses attract scumbags for precisely the reasons suggested in the book (they are easy to deceive), and in a way such activity is just the natural downside of inheriting a large fortune in the first place. Without justifying the behavior of any of the people involved, I can't help but feel my feelings of pity are better directed elsewhere.
Does any old lady deserve to be taken advantage by scumbag lawyers or accounts?
I would be more than happy to return any property judged by such a court to be ill-gotten to any rightful recipients of it.
It seems odd to me to feel bad for someone who had this problem only because she inherited a bunch of wealth she didn't earn. That's not a question of what she "deserves" but rather who "deserves" our sympathies.
Hello? Beth Israel is a non-profit teaching hospital in New York City that is over 100 years old. that they might have a role in bilking an elderly patient is shocking, plain and simple. (I've been there as a patient myself.)
not to mention exposing the corruption of attorneys, doctors, and various caregivers - people who are supposed to, by virtue of their professions, put the client or patient's interest first.
would this have been a scandal if it were for someone's entire life savings at $100,000? $1,000,000?
at what point on the financial scale does someone become worthy of taking advantage of? some arbitrary metric, where a person is deemed to have "earned" their wealth?
i'm sure this type of thing happens on a smaller scale. we don't hear about it because there aren't enough juicy details to make a 300+ page book. if we're going to talk about who "deserves" our sympathies - imagine it was a family member, then answer accordingly.
You're missing my point. You're focusing on whether the actions of the caregivers are justified instead of focusing on our reaction to what happened. People do bad things all the time, surely you don't feel outraged every time it happens.
So why feel particularly sympathetic for someone who inherited a tremendous fortune, then didn't do anything to protect it, despite having every opportunity to do so? I can say "who cares?" without justifying the actions of anyone involved.
I'll be outraged for you. My family is very good about caring for our elderly. The predation is real. The woman in this article could easily have been my grandparents.
People over 70 start to lose their skepticism and can become easy prey for cons, high pressure sales, and other grifters. Just subscribe to your state's attorney general's newsletters to see how rampant this is.
Yes, she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth. But if this article is accurate, Huguette Clark was held as a virtual prisoner by Beth Israel Hospital, and was exploited many others. That just makes me sad.
Gross wealth inequity is a terrible societal problem. Fixing the tax codes is the solution, not stealing from little old ladies.
TL;DR: Two wrongs don't make a right.
My problem was with the tone of the article. Why feel bad for someone who suffers a natural consequence of inherited wealth?
This is a natural consequence, ehh?
Same reason you'd feel bad for anyone? "Natural consequence" doesn't really mean much. Why feel bad for someone that suffers a natural consequence of inherited genes?
Do you feel bad for everyone that something bad happens to?
> Why feel bad for someone that suffers a natural consequence of inherited genes?
You feel bad for them because usually these people are dealt a bad hand in the cosmic game of cards. But this woman was dealt an unimaginably good hand, and then some bad things happened to her that tend to be correlated with the benefits of that fortune. But on the karmic balance, she still made out like a bandit.
I would only ask that you consider that we're all stuck on this rock, with no instruction manual, and no way off, just trying to get through each day the best we can. I have one of those crazy cousins that brought all the badness down on himself. But none of us like seeing him suffer or exploited. Because he really didn't know any better.
Peace.
E-gads. That had to have been a mistake.
You are not supposed to get worked up over it, any more than you would get worked up over a poor person getting taken advantage of.
It's a bad thing. We observe it and learn from it. We treat everybody equally regardless of whether they "won the cosmic lottery" or not. Getting worked up should be the furthest thing from your mind.
Now perhaps you find it all boring. Fair enough. But to be proud of your own callousness towards others? Not a good thing to be advertising.
He made some money in the 90's and since then seems to have spent a lot of time thinking about the problems of the rich. I once saw a talk he gave at Google, the upshot of which was that once you're rich there's almost nothing worth doing.
Sad.
These doctors and nurses have some gall as members of the working class to consider acting like those they serve. Who do they think they are? Millionaires?
Because that sure is working for free right?
Just as her father buying his senate seat was... Just as the various ways in which Montana copper mine strikes were dealt with, just as the way Montana came to become a state.
I suspect you may be uncomfortable with the moral foundations of US law and how that country and its wealth came to be as well as the legal means by which one may acquire wealth in the United States.
but there is not talks about medical accountabilityq and transparency, which is the solution to the root issue, making the talks on assisted suicide frivolous. but i guess solving problems does not win votes.
What's sad to me is the general populace thinking a "doctor" is anything more than a spineless vulture pushing whatever status-quo pill regime is hot in the pharma industry. Doctors like this should be fucking hung, I'm not joking. I don't care if you are desperate for that third mercedes. You're a scum bag trying to milk the death of an elderly lady that doesn't know any better. Really, what the fuck is the point of "healthcare" in this obviously broken industry built on exploiting health rather than fixing it.
It's far better to be old and poor in New York City, that way you can get food stamps instead of having to subsist on a paltry quarter billion dollars.
If that woman lived the last 20 years of her life without friends and normal human connections - it was a prison with gold bars but prison non the less.
Why is that we always look on the poor people below us as "they deserve it", and on the richer than us that are not fortunate as "big deal - they have money" it is only us the the Goldilocks of suffering that deserve compassion from the universe.
As much as I would love to be both (or either) rich and in NYC, I don't see how this is relevant to the community.
1) Written by Philip Greenspun: "Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology"
2) Published under harvard.edu domain.
3) Money
4) NYC
Separately why do people when stating an opinion need to say "I hate to be that guy"?
To me that equates to "I'm not sure of my opinion and treading lightly".
(I really do want to know your thoughts on my question btw.)
Under "What to Submit": "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Since it's being upvoted, then I guess it's gratifying enough people's intellectual curiosity.
Taking into account (see my comment "four guesses") the question is would this happen if:
1) Written by a Dental Hygienist at SUNY Binghamton?
2) Published under a community college domain?
3) No link to big money.
4) Place it happened was in a suburb of Cincinnati Oh?
This is where this story brings value, because it reveals dark and sinister sides of humans, to leech from people, exploiting their generousity. Regardless of how big the fortunes are, that is incredibly deplorable.