Posted by Jay Livingston
Gary Kremen is the founder of Match.com. He’s 43 years old and worth about $10 million. If it were you, you might think you’d slack off, take it easy, and enjoy the life your money can buy. But Kremen, according to a story in Sunday’s New York Times, “logs 60- to 80-hour workweeks because, he said, he does not think he has nearly enough money to ease up.” That’s the way it is in Silicon Valley.
“You’re nobody here at $10 million,” Mr. Kremen said earnestly over a glass of pinot noir at an upscale wine bar here.Kremen is typical of millionaires in the area and probably elsewhere. They are not the richest of the rich – they are merely “single-digit millionaires” – and they put it long hours in order to get richer. “Working class millionaires,” the Times calls them.
It seems as though no amount is ever enough. The article quotes another 70-hours-a-week millionaire: “Here, the top 1 percent chases the top one-tenth of 1 percent, and the top one-tenth of 1 percent chases the top one-one-hundredth of 1 percent.” It’s “a marathon with no finish line.” But why do they keep running?
Nearly forty years ago, Samuel Stouffer coined the term “relative deprivation” to account for those who objectively had more than most others yet felt dissatisfied. (Stouffer was looking not at income but at promotions in the military, but the same principle was at work.) No matter how much you have, if you compare yourself with others who have more, you’re going to feel deprived. It’s just one more way in which people are not rational about money.
But it’s nothing new, at least not in America. Here’s deTocqueville, writing in 1836:
In America I saw the freest and most enlightened men placed in the happiest circumstances that the world affords, it seemed to me as if a cloud habitually hung upon their brow, and I thought them serious and almost sad, even in their pleasures. . . .there is something surprising in this strange unrest of so many happy men, restless in the midst of abundance.Who were the 1830s was counterparts of the dot.com millionaire, and what were the counterparts of the expensive cars, houses, planes, etc. they want more of? Whatever they might have been, deTocqueville saw the endless marathon:
Besides the good things that he possesses, he every instant fancies a thousand others that death will prevent him from trying if he does not try them soon. This thought fills him with anxiety, fear, and regret and keeps his mind in ceaseless trepidation, which leads him perpetually to change his plans and his abode.
3 comments:
I read Robert Frank's _Falling Behind_ yesterday, which is a brief treatment of the social dilemmas that are caused by relative deprivation among the middle and upper classes.
The Times had a review of it yesterday, and I was going to mention it, but I wanted to keep the post short. Somewhere else (can't remember where -- some blog perhaps), Frank writes about economists choosing to ignore relative deprivation because it doesn't fit with their models.
I remember learning the concept of absolute deprivation and relative deprivation in my Social Movements class at Montclair. It made a huge impact on me.
The articles on Sunday about the millionaires were fascinating.
I see it in my own life. My mom and her husband live in Naples, Florida. They are on the lower end of the income scale there. 'All' they have is a house in Naples, and a house in Skaneateles, NY. He truly thinks he is a failure because he did not make it big at Goldman.
I understand it to some degree, because, in the mind, it becomes about your children. Did you give them enough "advantage", compared to your peers? You couldn't afford a private college and had to send them to public, etc. You can see yourself as failure if you didn't do everything possible.
I try to take a different approach and remember it is more important to be a decent person than a wealthy one. Our definitions of success in our society is questionable, to me.
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