[ With plagues, political dysfunction and near-Dickensian economic
differences rampant, a Mother Jones editor charts the lives of the
super rich, showing the fascinating, otherworldly realm they
inhabit—and the insidious ways this realm harms us all.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘JACKPOT’ LOOKS AT HOW INEQUALITY IS EXPERIENCED BY THE VERY,
VERY RICH  
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Jennifer Szalai
April 28, 2021
New York Times
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_ With plagues, political dysfunction and near-Dickensian economic
differences rampant, a Mother Jones editor charts the lives of the
super rich, showing the fascinating, otherworldly realm they
inhabit—and the insidious ways this realm harms us all. _

Mansion in Beverly Hills with a 13,000 bottle #wine cellar, plus 25
acre estate & private vineyard that produces over 400 cases of
#BeverlyHills finest., CNBC special on The Super Rich

 

If you have ever wondered how the ultra-rich live, it turns out —
are you ready for it? — they live pretty well. Even in the early,
chaotic days of the pandemic, they managed as a class to thrive:
hunkered down in the Hamptons while the values of their stock
portfolios soared, able to procure precious Covid tests that were
unavailable to the unmoneyed and unconnected.

But Michael Mechanic wants us to see how being rich isn’t the life
of carefree ease that it’s made out to be. Part of his argument in
“Jackpot” is that such inordinate wealth “harms us all” —
including the ultra-rich themselves, even if their reality is so
remote from ours that they wouldn’t know what “us” was if it
came brandishing a pitchfork.

The prospect of being “blissfully unshackled” from ordinary
economic constraints sounds so liberating that “seldom do we
interrupt our reveries to contemplate the social, psychological and
societal complications that come with great affluence.” This gave me
pause: Whose responsibility is it to contemplate this idea, and is it
really all that counterintuitive? Isn’t it the plot of the New
Testament?

 

Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live — and How Their Wealth Harms
Us All
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By Michael Mechanic
Simon & Schuster; 416 pages
April 13, 2021
Hardback:  $28.00
ISBN13: 9781982127213

 

Simon & Schuster
 

But Mechanic, a senior editor at Mother Jones, shows that as the
topmost sliver of the 1 percent has peeled off from the rest of the
population, resentment of their situation has escalated while
comprehension has declined. I sometimes wasn’t so sure about
Mechanic’s insistence that we need to extend any special empathy to
ultra-rich people, who seem more than capable of taking care of
themselves. But as this readable book progressed, I appreciated his
attempt to pull off a delicate balancing act: serving up the
digestible morality tale of people spoiling themselves truly rotten
before he digs into the fibrous, sociological knot of the system as a
whole.

Mechanic chose his title deliberately, being susceptible himself to
the lure of hitting it big. He recalls purchasing lottery tickets when
he was making a decent salary working for The Industry Standard, the
magazine of the dot-com boom, in the late ’90s. He was indulging in
the get-rich-quick fantasies of the time. There was the recent college
grad who used a trace amount of the $30 million he acquired
(“earned” doesn’t seem like quite the right word) after Netscape
went public to fill his bathtub with Silly Putty. “A lottery jackpot
is so raw, so disconnected from anything real,” Mechanic writes. He
chalks up such windfalls to “dumb luck,” though it’s clear that
many of the rich people he describes think they’re very smart.

Yes, Mechanic allows, there are individuals who innovate and take on
enormous risks and put in start-up hours for years and perhaps deserve
to earn more than others. But economic inequality is now so extreme,
he suggests, that there’s no way to explain it convincingly in terms
of the so-called meritocracy that gets trotted out whenever panicked
tycoons hear the words “taxes” and “redistribution.” Mechanic
questions the morality of a society that allows individuals to
accumulate billions of dollars for themselves. Citing Anand
Giridharadas’s 2018 book “Winners Take All,”
[[link removed]] Mechanic
says that relying on this billionaire class for its enormous
philanthropic outlays is a sign that something has gone terribly
wrong.

The first third of “Jackpot” is devoted to the goodies that money
can buy: a $400,000 car, a $21,000 bathtub, a bespoke watch so
intricate that its price is a secret. At times the parade of opulence
is so garish that I started feeling numb. Mechanic might say that I,
like the people who can actually afford such things, had hit my
“satiation point.” A psychologist who specializes in the mental
health of the rich says that they are actually at a disadvantage when
it comes to happiness. The less moneyed among us can still hold out
the hope, even if it gets constantly frustrated, that more money would
solve all our problems, while “his clients don’t have that fallacy
to cling to.”

Still, as Mechanic concedes, those clients can at least afford to
address their mental health issues. They can pay for concierge health
care in a country where even basic, affordable health care isn’t a
given. They can easily send their children to the priciest private
schools, where minuscule class sizes ensure “extensive nurturing.”
I sometimes sensed that Mechanic, despite his generous talk about the
need for “empathizing with the pain of fortunate people,” felt
what some of his readers might: the stirrings of class rage.

One thing that makes it hard for a reader to do much empathizing is
that Mechanic ended up talking to only a handful of these “fortunate
people.” It wasn’t for lack of trying. As he explains, such people
are extremely secretive about their wealth for all kinds of reasons,
including an awareness that being candid about their lives would make
them possible targets of not only theft and ransom demands but also
envy — and perhaps provoke in them attendant feelings of shame.
Consequently, he mostly interviewed those who feel uncomfortable with
their extreme wealth and have devoted themselves to causes like a more
equitable tax code.

Besides, empathy for high-net-worth individuals would seem to be
largely beside the point, since what Mechanic arrives at in the last
third of “Jackpot” is an exploration of how structural so many
problems are. That the ultra-wealthy skew overwhelmingly white
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that something systemic is afoot.

Mechanic offers such a fluent survey of the vast literature on
historical inequality — indicating that he’s not only read that
literature but understood its implications — that I was surprised by
his upbeat ending, when he suggests that transformative change could
happen if only more rich people had a change of heart.

“This needn’t be a French-style Revolution, one the wealthy must
fear,” he writes, “but rather a revolution in which they can play
a constructive role, picking up a pitchfork with the rest and using it
to bale a neighbor’s hay in exchange for camaraderie and a hearty
meal.” Considering that the sumptuous lifestyles he has described
don’t even entail cleaning one’s own bathroom, let alone baling
anybody’s hay, it’s unclear how this is going to work.

_Book author Michael Mechanic is a senior editor at Mother
Jones magazine. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife,
two teenagers, and various animals. Jackpot is his first book._

_[Essayist JENNIFER SZALAI is the nonfiction critic at The New York
Times. She started in this role in January 2018, after having worked
for four years as an editor for The New York Times Book Review. Szalai
was born in Canada and attended the University of Toronto, studying
political science and peace and conflict.  Follow Jennifer Szalai on
Twitter: @jenszalai [[link removed]].]_

_A version of this article appears in print on April 29, 2021, Section
C, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Oh, the Pain of
the Filthy Rich. _

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