The Elephant in The Room
Sorry, I know it's a cliché. Just be grateful I'm not about to start banging on about "global warming". (The boy Tremayne at Samizdata has a rather amusing little vignette skewering Hollywood's dreary obsession with green causes.)
No, the elephant to which I refer is the one that goes unmentioned in this Sunday Times piece. Apparently, we're entering another golden age of the super rich. Millions are being made and ostentatiously spent every day. Champagne, Porsches, hedge funds, private equity, blah blah blah idlerichcakes. The point of the piece is that whereas the last time this kind of money-making was prevalent, apparently in the Victorian era (like, not the Eighties? Come on, surely we haven't exhausted the Eighties' bogeyman potential yet?), when the super-rich were possessed either of a sufficiently strong social conscience or a sufficiently well-developed sense of preservation to do a great deal of charitable work, this time around no-one's giving anything away (except Bill Gates, of course).
There are two reasons for this. One of them, that poverty is these days to a large extent relative as opposed to absolute, the article notes, in passing, before ignoring it and getting back to the point of the piece, which is subtly to warn that rich that unless they start ponying up they can expect another revolution, because God knows everyone deserves to share in others' success, right? So far so predictable (it is staggering to me that certain "progressive" friends of mine consider the Sunday Times unacceptably Tory in character). The other is not mentioned at all, despite the article running some 3,200 words.
It is, of course, the welfare state. In the Victorian era there was still the concept of noblesse oblige, the idea that one indeed had a responsibility to help those less fortunate than oneself. But the general feeling that the nobles weren't feeling sufficiently obliged led inexorably to the establishment of the welfare state, and the consequent eradication of the custom, long passed down the generations, of charitable work or donation. The metacontext these days tells us that the state will do all the work - after all, it taxes the rich enough. Is it any wonder that they have simply lost the habit of charity?
No, the elephant to which I refer is the one that goes unmentioned in this Sunday Times piece. Apparently, we're entering another golden age of the super rich. Millions are being made and ostentatiously spent every day. Champagne, Porsches, hedge funds, private equity, blah blah blah idlerichcakes. The point of the piece is that whereas the last time this kind of money-making was prevalent, apparently in the Victorian era (like, not the Eighties? Come on, surely we haven't exhausted the Eighties' bogeyman potential yet?), when the super-rich were possessed either of a sufficiently strong social conscience or a sufficiently well-developed sense of preservation to do a great deal of charitable work, this time around no-one's giving anything away (except Bill Gates, of course).
There are two reasons for this. One of them, that poverty is these days to a large extent relative as opposed to absolute, the article notes, in passing, before ignoring it and getting back to the point of the piece, which is subtly to warn that rich that unless they start ponying up they can expect another revolution, because God knows everyone deserves to share in others' success, right? So far so predictable (it is staggering to me that certain "progressive" friends of mine consider the Sunday Times unacceptably Tory in character). The other is not mentioned at all, despite the article running some 3,200 words.
It is, of course, the welfare state. In the Victorian era there was still the concept of noblesse oblige, the idea that one indeed had a responsibility to help those less fortunate than oneself. But the general feeling that the nobles weren't feeling sufficiently obliged led inexorably to the establishment of the welfare state, and the consequent eradication of the custom, long passed down the generations, of charitable work or donation. The metacontext these days tells us that the state will do all the work - after all, it taxes the rich enough. Is it any wonder that they have simply lost the habit of charity?
posted by Novus at 09:42
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