21세기 부자의 의미? What does it mean to be rich in the 21st century?

[논둑길맨발로]

오늘날의 부자의 삶과 세상에 대한 독특한 점은 무엇인가?
What is unique about the lives and world of rich in today's era?


1.신자유주의 시대, 커가는 사회적불평등 속에서 부자들의 특권의식
경제적 부(특권)과 도덕적 행위 사이에서 갈등
부에 대한 도덕적 관심 표명
부의 특권을 합리화하기 위한 방편으로 '선량한 부자' 강조

The rich were conflicts about how to be both wealthy and morally worthy – especially at a historical moment of extreme economic inequality.

Either way, the vast majority implicitly or explicitly indicated that they had some kind of moral concern about having wealth.

In order to feel that they deserved their advantages, they tried to interpret themselves as legitimately privileged “good people”.
Their narratives delineated three characteristics of “good people”.

착한 부자가 되기 위한 세가지 조건

1.근면
First, good people work hard. Across the board, these affluent parents described themselves as hard workers, drawing on general associations in American Dream ideology between work and worth. They valued self-sufficiency and productivity, and rejected self-indulgence and dependence. Those who had earned their wealth wore their paid employment proudly. Those who had inherited wealth or did not currently work for pay resisted stereotypes of laziness or dilettantism, and offered alternate narratives of themselves as productive workers.

2.신중한 소비
Second, good people are prudent consumers. It may be counterintuitive to associate wealthy New Yorkers with Puritans, whom we imagine as self-denying ascetics, when they have large homes full of material goods, travel widely, raise their children in comfort, and for the most part are not very religious. Yet they described their desires and needs as basic and their spending as disciplined and family-oriented. They asserted that they could live without their advantages if they had to, and distanced themselves from negative images of consumption such as ostentation, materialism and excess. These interpretations allowed them to believe that they deserved what they had, and to cast themselves as normal people rather than rich ones.

3.기부
The third requirement for being a good person – the obligation to “give back”—more explicitly recognises privilege. But this imperative meant different things to different people. Often to give back meant to be aware of and appreciate their advantages rather than to take them for granted – an essentially private state of feeling. Many gave away money, and time as well, in charitable enterprises of various kinds. But these practices were marked by ambivalence over what it meant to identify and be visible as a wealthy person. Those who faced upward, who moved in relatively class-homogenous communities, were more likely to take for granted that they would play this kind of role.


cf. 20세기 전반기 부자들의 특권의식: 특권에 대한 자신감과 우월감으로 충만.
현대 부자에게서 보는 부에 대한 도덕적 관심과 부와 특권 사이의 갈등이 결여

The wealthy women that Susan Ostrander studied for her book Women of the Upper Class, born mainly between 1900 and 1940, appeared comfortable with their class privilege. For the most part raised in a homogenous wealthy community, they saw themselves as pillars of that community, publicly carrying out charitable works and preparing their children to follow in their upper-class footsteps by organising their prep school educations and debutante parties.

Ostrander sees this community participation as an attempt to justify their privilege, but she does not describe any significant conflict about their class advantages. In fact, these women saw themselves as “being better than other people”, expressing “a sense of moral, as well as social, superiority”.



부자들이 중산층의 문화적 정당성을 장악한다-
풍요의 표준화

The most visible elite lifestyles – those of “real” housewives or wolves of Wall Street – are widely seen as over the top, unnecessary and thus worthy of critique. In contrast, in their appeals to ordinariness, my respondents move to occupy the cultural legitimacy of the middle class. They want to be in the middle, not in a distributional sense but rather in the affective sense of having the habits and desires of the middle class. As long as the wealthy can distance themselves from images of “bad” rich people, their entitlement is acceptable. In fact, it is almost as if they are not rich.
It is especially striking that “the middle” is symbolically available to everyone, even if they have $50m and are thus actually at the tippy-top of the income distribution, as long as they can claim a particular kind of disposition and lifestyle. This forms part of the normalisation of affluence, the larger cultural process by which the top comes to seem like the middle.

If people at the top are those who buy $20m houses in the Hamptons, those in the middle can be the people who earn $2m per year and have $5m in assets. This normalisation of affluence is also visible in US popular culture, in which lifestyles that would actually be quite expensive appear in ostensibly middle-class settings on television and in the movies. At the same time, the actual middle class and the poor disappear from public view.


착한 부자론은 사회의 구조적 불평등을 숨기기 위한 이데올르기

As we judge rich people for consuming well or badly, working hard or being lazy, giving money away or keeping it, we create distinctions that legitimate the system. Even negative judgments of individual behaviour reproduce the logic of legitimate entitlement: to say someone is inhabiting privilege incorrectly is also to say it is possible to inhabit it correctly. This focus on distinctions among individuals draws attention away from institutions and social processes such as the systematic unequal distribution of resources.
Scholars and activists have long pointed out that people interpret structural problems as individual ones. It is common, for example, to blame poor people for their own poverty, suggesting that they do not work hard enough or are otherwise morally deficient, when in fact they face structural disadvantages in educational and legal institutions as well as in labour markets. People who struggle economically are also apt to blame themselves rather than the system for their failure to advance.

The wealthy people I talked with vary in how much they explain their social position solely with reference to hard work and other individual attributes. But they manage their discomfort with privilege by turning inward, toward managing affect and behaviour, rather than outward, toward social structure and distribution. Of course trying to be worthy of privilege at the top of the income distribution is not the same as blaming oneself or being blamed for economic struggle at the bottom. But the failure to connect what C Wright Mills called “personal troubles of milieu” – by which he meant problems of individuals in their immediate social environments – to “public issues of social structure” is the same.


부자들의 meritocaracy에 대한 신뢰


Sherman found that her interviewees, all in the top 1-2 percent of income or wealth or both, had thoroughly imbibed the narrative of meritocracy to rationalize their affluence and immense privileges. That is, they believed they deserved all their money because of hard work and individual effort. Most identified themselves as socially and political liberal and took pains to distinguish themselves from “bad” rich people who flaunt their wealth.


비판1. 가부는 양심세탁
국가의 복지정책을 무력화
First, a note about philanthro-capitalism or as Peter Buffet (Warren Buffet’s son) terms it, “conscience laundering.” In Chris Rock’s pithy phrase (by way of Balzac), “Behind every fortune is a great crime” and given what we know about the sources of great wealth —the collectivity— these monies should be supporting public needs that are democratically determined not the cherry-picked, pet projects of billionaires. And this reveals another motive behind private charity: the desire to stifle any enthusiasm for an activist government responsible to the public will.
I should add that whenever I hear a philanthropist piously proclaim, “I just wanted to give something back,” my first impulse is to shout “Why not give it all back?” That is, I’ve always been partial to the moral injunction, “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required.” (Luke 12:48) And although I won’t attempt to improve on scripture, I might suggest “From whom much is taken, much is owed.”

비판2. 자수성가란 없다. 부자가 이룬 부의 90%는 사회적 기여의 몫

Second, one might ask about the case where a person of modest means succeeds at something and accumulates a fortune? We’ve all heard or read ad infinitum, someone exclaim, “Damn it! Nobody even handed me anything. I did it all on my own. I’m entirely self-made.” Isn’t that evidence of individual merit? No. For starters, as Chuck Collins, heir to the Oscar Mayer fortune, once put it, “Where would wealthy entrepreneurs be without taxpayer investments in the Internet, transportation, public education, the legal system, the human genome project and so on?”
Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize winner in Economics, has calculated the societal contribution at ninety percent of what people earn in Northwest Europe and the United States.

In addition to the sources mentioned above, just off the top of my head I can list many other factors that belie this powerfully seductive but wholly fictional narrative, one that’s also touted to and embraced by many members of the working class: Child labor, Chinese and Irish immigrant labor (railroads), eminent domain, massacres of striking workers, state repression of unions, Immigration Act of 1864, public land grabs, corporate welfare, installing foreign dictators to guarantee cheap labor and resources, inheritance laws, public schools and universities, public expense mail systems, property and contract laws, government tax breaks incentives to business, Securities and Exchange Commission to ensure trust in the stock market, the U.S. military, and a police state to keep the rabble from picking up pitchforks. Another factor that almost merits its own paragraphs is pure luck. By any objective criteria, we can conclude that absent this arrangement there would be no accumulation of private wealth.


결론.meritocaracy 는 거짓말

Finally, meritocracy is the classic American foundation myth and provides the basis for an entire array of other fairy tales. Foremost, this illusion serves to justify policies that foster economic inequality and hinder the development of social movements. After so many decades of neoliberal ideology, this lie is now firmly lodged in the public’s collective consciousness but I’m convinced that with effort and relying on the evidence, it can be expunged.



원문출처

https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/sep/18/how-to-be-rich-and-morally-worthy-the-dilemma-of-wealthy-new-yorkers-rachel-sherman-uneasy-street



https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/05/10/meritocracy-is-a-lie/


Read more at:
//economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/64519115.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst