Park Avenue

Alex Gibney has produced a documentary which looks at the residents of one of the most exclusive apartment buildings in Manhattan and desperately poor folks in the South Bronx.  One of the interesting tidbits he gives is this:

When you make that much money, somehow you believe that it’s due entirely to your mental acumen—that it’s got nothing to do with anything else. If anybody suggests that you should pay slightly more taxes, or help out in some fundamental way to make the country a better place, you’re so thin-skinned that you believe that you’re being attacked personally—that you’re a victim.

This guy Paul Pitts did this really interesting experiment with the game of Monopoly. He would have two people come in, and he’d flip a coin, and the person who lost would get a thousand bucks, a hundred dollars every time they passed Go, and one die. The person who won got $2,000, $200 every time they passed Go, and two dice. Inevitably, that person wins. But what the experiment shows is—despite the fact that both players know the game is rigged—the person who inevitably wins imagines that they’re winning due not to some kind of circumstance—not luck—but it’s due only to their skill and intelligence.

There are certain markers in the game. He puts a big bowl of pretzels on the table and puts it equidistant from both players. We discovered that as the winning player starts to win, they inevitably pull the bowl of pretzels toward them and they start to eat more and more of the pretzels. It’s crazy. So what you see is that wealth in and of itself has a kind of corrupting influence on the human psyche. The idea that Stephen Schwarzman could ever compare paying more taxes to Hitler’s invasion of Poland is such a staggering mismatch of circumstance, you can’t even begin to imagine! He later apologized for that, but where does that even come from?

That kind of stuff is very interesting to me.  We seem to be programmed to react to our circumstances in certain ways.  Besides how wealth affects people, I think scarcity leads people to destructive behaviors they can barely understand or control.