Musk, whose wealth has lately hovered well over $400 billion, has enough money that he could, should he desire, end world hunger and still have billions to spare. If Jeff Bezos had a mind to, he could eliminate homelessness in America and still be one of the richest people in the world.
Yet of the half-dozen tech billionaires Trump displayed like trophies at his inauguration, most seem less concerned with the fate of the common American than they do with a sci-fi fantasy future that involves transhumanism, superhuman AI, and the survival of humanity as an interplanetary species.
At the very least, current circumstances might lead one to wonder: How the heck does someone get this way? And what does it mean for the rest of us?
In 2011, a Berkeley grad student named Paul Piff conducted an experiment that has since become famous in the world of social psychology. Over the course of several weekends, Piff and his research team crouched behind bushes at the intersection of Interstate 80 and Lincoln Highway in Berkeley, California. When a vehicle passed, they would catalog it — “five” for a brand-new BMW, for instance; “one” for a beat-up Honda. Then the researchers would observe the behavior of the car’s driver.
What Piff and his team found at that intersection is profound: Wealth tends to make people act like assholes, and the more wealth they have, the more of a jerk they tend to be. At the intersection the researchers were monitoring, drivers of the most expensive cars were roughly four times more likely to cut others off and three times less likely to stop for pedestrians, even when controlling for factors like the driver’s perceived gender and amount of traffic at the time they were collecting data.
For all the attention it has received, the car study was admittedly small, but other research has backed up its findings — and augmented them. Wealth makes you less generous (lower-income individuals have been shown to give a greater proportion of their income than wealthier ones), less compassionate (people with more money and status report less distress when confronted with another person’s suffering), and more narcissistic. In a hilariously pointed study that was also included in the PNAS article, people primed to think of themselves as upper-class were more likely to take candy from a jar that they had been told was meant for kids in a nearby lab. In other words, they were more likely to literally steal candy from children.
Yet the Berkeley team wasn’t just interested in the correlation between assholery and wealth; it also was interested in causation: Were people with less empathy more likely to become wealthy, or did wealth tend to deprive people of empathy?
Absolutely! Time to get out the fork and knives!!
Billionairism is a disease. These people are diseased.
