Transcript
According to press reports, Jeff Bezos is planning to sell his 417-foot yacht, the one with a carved figurehead of Lauren Sanchez, his second wife, at the front. According to these reports, he’s unhappy at the attention that the yacht is getting. Funny how that works.
Hi, Paul Krugman with a bit of an experiment.
I am recording this in a cafe, a cafe that is not in New York, as you could probably guess. Let’s see how the noise level works with the headphones.
OK obviously playing the world’s tiniest violin . We’re not going to weep for Jeff Bezos’s discomfort and yes there’s a certain amount of just plain satisfaction at seeing him taken down a peg.
But I think there’s a little bit more to it. This is not just invidious comparison and hostility towards people who have acquired great wealth, although there’s nothing wrong with that. This is about the role of moods, vibes, and the motivations of the malefactors of great wealth that play such a large role in the US political system now.
As everybody should know, we have seen an extraordinary concentration of wealth at the top, probably bigger than the concentration that took place in the Gilded Age. And it’s gone along with something which is, I think, different from what we had in the late 19th century. In the late 19th century there were certain proprieties that people of great wealth felt that they had to observe. They had to maintain a certain pretense. The Victorian virtues were honored at least on the face of it.
Extremely wealthy men had conventional marriages. Presumably very many of them had mistresses as well; the strictures of conventional morality were not actually obeyed nearly as much as people wanted you to think — but they wanted you to think. They wanted to pretend to be good family men, all of that. A kind of hypocrisy was part of the package, and hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.
Now we have a very permissive culture, which is not on the whole a bad thing. There’s a lot of openness, there’s a lot of misery that is avoided by not having to maintain the pretense that all marriages are happy, that people don’t have whatever motivations they have in reality. But one of the things that’s happened is that we have now a plutocracy, a concentration of incredible wealth and power at the top, without even the hypocrisy of morality, the hypocrisy of pretending to be virtuous.
Now there was, politically, some back pressure against that until Trump was elected the second time. And I think we have to bear in mind, we have to take seriously the idea that an important reason that we are in the state we’re in, an important reason that we have a would-be fascist regime in power — I don’t think they’re quite managing to pull it off, but they definitely would if they could — is that a handful of incredibly wealthy men wanted all restraints off.
They wanted to be able to live the privilege of their great wealth. They wanted to be able to just flaunt their wealth, performatively display their dominance, not have to worry about people chiding them for being politically incorrect just because they were abusive towards other people because of their gender or their whatever, their race, anything.
There was a Financial Times article just after the 2024 election with Wall Street people celebrating the fact that they were now free to say pussy and retard again. This is a pretty big deal. And I think if you look at the first year or so of the second Trump administration, the people at the top, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, they all were acting as if OK, no need to apologize, no need to pretend to be good.
By the way, charitable giving has dropped way off. The super wealthy are just not doing the kind of reputation enhancing philanthropic giving that their predecessors in the Gilded Age engaged in. So this is a completely amoral elite, I got it, you don’t, I’m in power, I’m friends with the people who hold ultimate power, I don’t have to worry, I don’t care what you think.
But it’s not lasting. It turns out, and this is why I think this is somewhat important, it turns out that the backlash is powerful enough, scary enough at least to worry them.
I don’t think that people like Bezos are actually scared that the torches and pitchforks are coming for them, but they are starting to realize that maybe they haven’t purchased themselves total immunity the way they thought they had. And this is, I think, a good sign. We need more hypocritical billionaires.
OK, we need fewer billionaires and we need to work on that. But in the meantime having them feel at least somewhat disciplined by the public opprobrium that outrageous behavior brings is a good thing. More ostracism, more boycotts, sneering at and yelling at giant yachts and people who own them is a good thing.
Now, of course, Jeff Bezos choosing to spend his infinite billions on something other than a yacht, doesn’t actually free that wealth up, although maybe even maybe he might be persuaded to spend a little bit on good causes.
But in any case I think there’s something culturally going on. I think we are seeing a turn and we’re seeing that the collapse of all standards in favor of the belief that wealth is the only thing that matters is not complete and may even be reversible.
So, this is a silly story but I think not an entirely trivial one.
Anyway, let’s find out if this recording is actually audible given the cafe noises behind me.
