فصل دهم: تنها ثروتمندها با سم مسموم می‌شوند: ترجیحات دیگران

Chapter 10 Only the Rich Are Poisoned: The Preferences of Others

The salesman is the boss—How to drink poison—Advertising and manipulation—The unbearable silence of large mansions on Sunday evening

When people get rich, they shed their skin-in-the-game-driven experiential mechanism. They lose control of their preferences, substituting constructed preferences for their own, complicating their lives unnecessarily, triggering their own misery. And these constructed preferences are of course the preferences of those who want to sell them something. This is a skin-in-the-game problem, as the choices of the rich are dictated by others who have something to gain, and no side effects, from the sale. And given that they are rich, and their exploiters not often so, nobody would shout victim.

I once had dinner in a Michelin-starred restaurant with a fellow who insisted on eating there instead of my selection of a casual Greek taverna with a friendly owner-operator whose second cousin was the manager and third cousin once removed was the friendly receptionist. The other customers seemed, as we say in Mediterranean languages, to have a cork plugged in their behind obstructing proper ventilation, causing the vapors to build on the inside of the gastrointestinal walls, leading to the irritable type of decorum you only notice in the educated semi-upper classes. I noted that, in addition to the plugged corks, all the men wore ties.

Dinner consisted of a succession of complicated small things, with microscopic ingredients and contrasting tastes that forced you to concentrate as if you were taking some entrance exam. You were not eating, rather visiting some type of museum with an affected English major lecturing you on some artistic dimension you would have never considered on your own. There was so little that was familiar and so little that fit my taste buds: once something on the occasion tasted like something real, there was no chance to have more as we moved on to the next dish. Trudging through the dishes and listening to some bull***t by the sommelier about the paired wine, I was afraid of losing concentration. It costs a lot of energy to fake that you’re not bored. In fact, I discovered an optimization in the wrong place: the only thing I cared about, the bread, was not warm. It appears that this is not a Michelin requirement for three stars.

VENENUM IN AURO BIBITUR

I left the place starving. Now, if I had a choice, I would have had some time-tested recipe (say a pizza with very fresh ingredients, or a juicy hamburger) in a lively place—for a twentieth of the price. But because the dinner partner could afford the expensive restaurant, we ended up the victims of some complicated experiments by a chef judged by some Michelin bureaucrat. It would fail the Lindy effect: food does better through minute variations from Sicilian grandmother to Sicilian grandmother. It hit me that the rich were natural targets; as the eponymous Thyestes shouts in Seneca’s tragedy, thieves do not enter impecunious homes, and one is more likely to be drinking poison in a golden cup than an ordinary one. Poison is drunk in golden cups (Venenum in auro bibitur).

It is easy to scam people by getting them into complications—the poor are spared that type of scamming. This is the same complication we saw in Chapter 9 that makes academics sell the most possibly complicated solution when a simple one can do. Further, the rich start using “experts” and “consultants.” An entire industry meant to swindle you will swindle you: financial consultants, diet advisors, exercise experts, lifestyle engineers, sleeping councilors, breathing specialists, etc.

Hamburgers, to many of us, are vastly tastier than filet mignon because of the higher fat content, but people have been convinced that the latter is better because it is more expensive to produce.

My idea of the good life is to not attend a gala dinner, one of those situations where you find yourself stuck seated for two hours between the wife of a Kansas City real estate developer (who just visited Nepal) and a Washington lobbyist (who just returned from a vacation in Bali).

LARGE FUNERAL HOMES

Same with real estate: most people, I am convinced, are happier in close quarters, in a real barrio-style neighborhood, where they can feel human warmth and company. But when they have big bucks they end up pressured to move into outsized, impersonal, and silent mansions, far away from neighbors. On late afternoons, the silence of these large galleries has a funereal feel to it, but without the soothing music. This is something historically rare: in the past, large mansions were teeming with servants, head-servants, butlers, cooks, assistants, maids, private tutors, impoverished cousins, horse grooms, even personal musicians. And nobody today will come to console you for having a mansion—few will realize that it is quite sad to be there on Sunday evening.

As Vauvenargues, the French moralist, figured out, small is preferable owing to what we would call in today’s terms scale properties. Some things can be, simply, too large for your heart. Rome, he wrote, was easy to love by its denizens when it was a small village, harder when it became a large empire.

Prosperous people of the type who don’t look rich are certainly aware of the point—they live in comfortable quarters and instinctively know that a move will be a mental burden. Many still live in their original houses.

Very few people understand their own choices, and end up being manipulated by those who want to sell them something. In that sense, impoverishment might even be desirable. Looking at Saudi Arabia, which should progressively revert to the pre-oil level of poverty, I wonder if taking away some things from them—including the swarm of fawning foreigners coming to skin them—will make them better off.

To put it another way: if wealth is giving you fewer options instead of more (and more varied) options, you’re doing it wrong.

CONVERSATION

If anything, being rich you need to hide your money if you want to have what I call friends. This may be known; what is less obvious is that you may also need to hide your erudition and learning. People can only be social friends if they don’t try to upstage or outsmart one another. Indeed, the classical art of conversation is to avoid any imbalance, as in Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier: people need to be equal, at least for the purpose of the conversation, otherwise it fails. It has to be hierarchy-free and equal in contribution. You’d rather have dinner with your friends than with your professor, unless of course your professor understands “the art” of conversation.

Indeed, one can generalize and define a community as a space within which many rules of competition and hierarchy are lifted, where the collective prevails over one’s interest. Of course there will be tension with the outside, but that’s another discussion. This idea of competition being lifted within a group or a tribe was, once again, present in the notion of a group as studied by Elinor Ostrom.

NONLINEARITY OF PROGRESS

Now let us generalize to progress in general. Do you want society to get wealthy, or is there something else you prefer—avoidance of poverty? Are your choices yours or those of salespeople?

Let’s return to the restaurant experience and discuss constructed preferences as compared to natural ones. If I had a choice between paying $200 for a pizza or $6.95 for the French complicated experience, I would readily pay $200 for the pizza, plus $9.95 for a bottle of Malbec wine. Actually I would pay to not have the Michelin experience.

This reasoning shows that sophistication can, at some level, cause degradation, what economists call “negative utility.” This tells us something about wealth and the growth of gross domestic product in society; it shows the presence of an inverted U curve with a level beyond which you get incremental harm. It is detectable only if you get rid of constructed preferences.

Now, many societies have been getting wealthier and wealthier, many beyond the positive part of the inverted U curve, not counting the effect of the increased comfort on their spoiled children. And I am certain that if pizza were priced at $200, the people with corks plugged in their behinds would be lining up for it. But it is too easy to produce, so they opt for the costly, and pizza with fresh natural ingredients will be always cheaper than the complicated crap.

So long as society is getting richer, someone will try to sell you something until the point of degradation of your well-being, and a bit beyond that.

NEXT

The next chapter will present the rule of no verbal threat through the history of the experts of the craft, the sect of the Assassins.