Introduction
- Analysis at the nexus of wealth, philanthropy, and conservation
- Centers of extreme wealth and wealth disparity → intricate set of problems for whole community
- Teton County, WY → both the richest county in the US and the one with highest income inequality
- Here, focus on the world of the ultra-wealthy and increasing significance of their relationship w natural world → How do they use nature to solve key predicaments in their lives?
- Seeking to resolve problems rooted in 1) economic concerns and 2) social issues
- Consider their views of money, materialism, nature, how this relates to racial and ethical inequality… and beyond their words, how do these views influence behavior?
-
Above dilemmas resolved in two corresponding ways:
1) Whatever their good intentions, those at peak of socioeconomic pyramid use nature to climb even higher: using conservation to gain social status, secure private land
2) Burdened by social stigmas, guilt, etc., ultra-wealthy use nature and rural people as vehicles for personal transformation into more virtuous versions of themselves: friendships with moneyless people, appropriation of culture
- Massive amount of research, quantitative and qualitative research behind the story
- Interviews and network analyses of the wealthy
- Novel approach of conducting paired interviews of the wealthy with the poor (often Sp-speaking immigrant) who experienced the same events
- Focus on the wealthy addresses research gap in studying systems of inequality— much less common to take this “top-down” approach
- Empathy wall and other social barriers limit who/what we choose to research, but just as much to learn from the wealthy
Part 1: How We Got Here and What It Feels Like
1. New Nation of the Ultra-Wealthy
- Broader socioeconomic trends in the US → rapid growth in number of ultra-wealthy people
- Source of wealth = primarily financial investments rather than actual labor
- Driven to the West by natural resources/beauty, tax shelters, tech infrastructure
- Emergence of charitable-industrial complex where wealth is concentrating
- How to reconcile goof will of the ultra-wealthy with all of the injustice and poverty in their immediate community?
2. Mount Billionaire
- Places like the Yellowstone Club Foundation → give image and veneer of conservation & “solidarity” with local community, but in reality perpetuate envt harm, rural exclusion, militarized privacy
- Ecological destruction from such rapid development
- May provide jobs, but workers usually can afford to live nearby → multi hour commute
- How do the ultra-wealthy think they are being perceived, how does this affect their behavior towards outsiders, abs what is their rationale for why these stereotypes are wrong?
- Three myths leading to paranoia and persecution complex: 1) the ultra-wealthy are not deserving, 2) they are not integrated into the community like “normal” people, 3) they deserve to be taken advantage of
- In response to 2), “Wealth is just relative, doesn’t affect what relationships I can have”
- For 3), includes national policies like higher tax rates and local relationships
- Problems with the intense culture of privacy associated with the ultra-wealthy
- Impedes impartial and honest research
- Excludes the very people that built the Western culture so romanticized by the elite from large tracts of land
- Isolates community → distorted perceptions of how they are viewed
Part II: Using Nature to Solve Economic Dilemmas
- How nature is used to help the elite enjoy, share, protect, and multiply their wealth, through both philanthropy/conservation and access to natural resources
- Uncovers presence of an Environmental Veneer: simplistic assumption that conservation is always meant as a altruistic public good, rather than a tool for the elite to gain and maintain their wealth, ultimately reinforcing systems that lead to the environmental problems to begin with
3. Compensation Conservation
- Conservation easements (property owners get compensation often as charitable deduction in return for not developing their land any further) → straightforward way to lock away land, get huge tax deductions
- Does have ecological value, but also perpetuates inequality (no affordable housing, etc.)
- Limits on development → limits supply → skyrocketing home values that multiply wealth
- Conservation ultimately intensified wealth inequality drawing in the elite, by creating housing demand and land scarcity simultaneously
4. Connoisseur Conservation
- Beyond economic reasons, why are the rich drawn to nature? How does conservation, or even just enjoying nature, justify otherwise selfish or a moral decisions?
- Because the “purity” of “nature” offers “invaluable” joy/goodness, spending exorbitant amounts of money, for example, building a mansion in the wilderness or buying super expensive meat from a progressive rancher are morally permissible
- This despite the irony that most efforts at conservation are negligible wrt ecological footprint of how the rich got their wealth (oil and gas…)
- Three aspects of this worldview = Feel-Good Altruism (purifying and protecting nature), Conservation Therapy (preserving the medicinal storehouse, purity of naturw), Selective Science (ignoring deeper social causes of environmental crisis and focusing only on merits of land conservation)
5. Gilded Green Philanthropy
- Can wealth solve (via philanthropy) the very problems that wealth creates? To answer, first consider to what organizations and causes the money is going?
- “Marketplace” for philanthropy → certain causes, like envt conservation, have higher prestige vs addressing basic human needs
- Boom of NGOs and foundations in WY bc tax law and all, but very high turnover
- Very little of potential money to be donated actually is, and what is given is concentrated in ~10% NGOs, primarily dealing with conservation and the arts
- These select nonprofits also have disproportionate social and human resources— board members, etc.— and are highly interconnected
- In general, more assets → more social influence, except for private foundations: often socially and financially isolated from the community
- Conservation & the arts benefit from bridging capital (access to shared social and economic resources), while orgs serving human needs are forced to operate in isolation
6. Moneyfest Destiny
-
Three reasons that conservation is so useful and meaningful to the ultra-wealthy (the why behind previous trends)
1) Provides tool to recapture moral value they lost to gain economic success (connect with spiritual purity of nature, “Old Western” culture/traditions)
2) Is a vehicle to gain social prestige a la Rockefeller (buying huge tracts of land— despite the negative reactions to Rockefeller at the time by local communities; seems to be an ethically simple, capitalist, DIY approach)
3) Becomes non controversial leisure/bonding activity for social integration (allows elite to overlook “buzzkill issues” like housing, addiction, etc. with which they may be complicit)
Part III: Using Rural People to Solve Social Dilemmas
- Do the ultra-wealthy need for sell their possessions, give to the poor to live an ethical life?
- Important to remember that there are human stories and motivations behind the simplistic models of the motivation of the elite… where unique research strategy is valuable
7. Becoming Rural Poor, Naturally
- How does great wealth affect one’s self-perception, how they want to be perceived, and how they act as a result?
- Desire to be seen as “normal,” to attain attributes like simplicity, contentment, closeness to nature, while maintaining wealth
- Acquiring great wealth → lowers empathy, can produce intense social-psychological anxiety, group stigmatization of the elite (both internally and externally)
- To cope, they use their wealth to both cultivate a more fulfilling life and facilitate recognition and acceptance from the non wealthy (win-win!)
- Wealth currently viewed as amoral in American culture— simply a means to pursue happiness and fulfillment → no grounds to judge the wealthy, because we’re all striving for what they have
- The elite idealize and strive to be accepted by the “normal” person…
- Romanticizing working-class life as simple, pure, stress free: perhaps the physicality of working-poor jobs conflated with simplicity, vs immaterial nature of finance and tech
- Using poverty and nature as vehicles for escapism
- Culminates in self-transformation/“normalization” by 1) establishing relationships with working-class people, and 2) adopting working-class tastes (dress, music, vehicles)
- Seems like something uniquely able to be done in the West
- Often confuse servants for friends
8. Guilt Numbed
- Do the ultra-wealthy guilty? Sought to understand larger social environment in which guilt is experienced
- Do the rich feel judged by society?
- Overall, the elite do believe greed and extreme affluence are morally precarious
- Vaguely perceive judgement and ethical rebuke from the rest of society, but unaware of the true intensity of the criticisms, especially from local community
- Why is the guilt viewed by the elite as irrational or unmerited?
- Six main reasons: 1) modern consumption as a means for personal fulfillment, esp via nature, 2) jealousy and resentment by the nonwealthy, 3) trickle-down economics, 4) hard work, being self-made, 5) displacing blame on peers (ex. Wall Street, coastal elite), 6) inevitable external forces
Part IV: Ultra-Wealth through the Eyes of the Working Poor
- What can those at the very bottom teach us about those at the top?
- Paired interview approach → more nuanced views than just naked antipathy or resentment, but criticisms still present
9. No Time for Judgement
- How does the daily struggle to survive in the context of the richest county in America shape perceptions of the elite?
- Immediacy of the struggle for those in poverty → relatively positive view of the elite, bc provide jobs— don’t have the bandwidth to look beyond the present
- Awful state of housing, frequent evictions and rent hikes
- Belief that the wealthy deserved their money, in the meritocracy (hard work → success)
- Ironic bc the poor are really the ones who epitomize hard work
- Assumption of trickle-down effect, that the rich give a lot of money to NGOs
10. Cracking the Veneer
- More critical view of the elite from some better informed members of the community → challenge views the ultra wealthy have of themselves
- From the POV of the working poor, do the ultra-wealthy really care more about nature than people? Is their conservation focus hypocritical?
- Critical of the “empty virtue of affluent environmentalism,” donating more to dogs than children
You see a lot of charity but very little justice.
- Very little attention paid to systemic root causes of human and envt issues, in favor of showier and more immediate donations
- What do the “normal” people think about the elite’s idealization and adoption of their lifestyle?
- From dress alone, hard to tell who is rich and who is not
- Reject claim that the wealthy have genuine friendships with “normal” people— confuse servants for friends, often very one-sided relationships, so much suffering being ignored, racism and systematic exclusion of immigrants and POCs
- Are the ultra-wealthy deserving people?
- Question is more about infl of larger economic systems that allow for accumulation of extreme wealth than individual merit— regardless of how hard one works, usually not deserving of the excesses
- Idea that one can deserve their wealth if they are a just steward of it, give back to those in need
Epilogue: The Future of Wealth and the West
- Opportunities to improve the situation → building trust, increasing empathy → actually start to minimize harm