QuickTake: Income Inequality
Today in New York, the mindful display of one’s position has been honed to an art form. The wealthiest women take pride in wearing the same dress a few times. The chicest apartments are decorated minimally—the furniture and objects cost a great deal, but do not draw attention to themselves like a 17th-century gilded armoire.
A proper household once required the right silverware and china; now taking the children to an animal sanctuary in Tanzania is the priority. Instead of taking months for vacations and pulling the children out of school on a whim, today’s rich are busier than anyone else and their children more heavily scheduled.
Like many others, the rich are obsessed with their health, only more so. They’re as likely to spend $1,000 on a guru or juice cleanse as on a Gucci shirt. The banquet will be nut- and gluten-free with lots of sustainably and locally sourced veggies and protein.
The car must be electric. The diamonds must not have blood on them. The cashmere sweaters carry socially conscious messages embroidered across the chest, such as the brand Lingua Franca’s tribute to Ruth Bader Ginsburg that reads, “all rise.” At $350, the cashmere is soft, with an enlightened edge: It includes a $100 donation to the American Civil Liberties Union. Suddenly, Loro Piana seems frivolous.
Every now and then, a rare indulgence is spotted: A $1,000 jeroboam or a $500,000 necklace, but it’s discreet (partly for security reasons), and there’s always a story behind it to justify the extravagance. As for the Picasso or Cy Twombly, art may be one of the last true trophies.
The social hierarchy has become less evident as rich people break the codes and expectations associated with their fortunes. The daily Bible study of John D. Rockefeller and the marriages in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth might serve as guides, but so can the Instagram accounts of Lauren Santo Domingo, the fashion entrepreneur who married into a billionaire Colombian family, and of the Jenner and Kardashian clan.
The world’s second-wealthiest man, Bill Gates, devotes himself to building a state-of-the-art toilet for the estimated 2.3 billion people who live without modern plumbing. Donald Trump rises to the presidency positioning himself as a man-of-the-people billionaire with a taste for pomp and circumstance over charity.
Britain’s Prince Harry marries a mixed-race American divorcée. Seven months later, Beyoncé posts photographs of the dresses she wore to the Ambani family’s wedding festivities. The ceremony takes place in the 27-story Mumbai home of the father of the bride, Mukesh Ambani, the 11th-wealthiest man in the world. History is filled of examples with the indulgent and generous uses of money. A caliph enamored of a homesick Greek slave girl built an exact replica of her hometown, populated with thousands of his subjects. Hadrian rebuilt the Pantheon. Nero, upon seeing a 120-foot statue of himself he’d had built beside a private lake, declared, “At last, I am beginning to live like a human being.” At the height of the Gilded Age in 1889, Andrew Carnegie, who built libraries all over America and the world, wrote, “The man who dies rich, dies disgraced,” noting that large inheritances are “most injudicious.”
Warren Buffett, the third-richest person today, admits he hasn’t contributed “the most precious asset” to charity—his time. While he’s pledged to give 99 percent of his wealth away, he may be better known as the billionaire who gets his breakfast at McDonald’s every day.