Is it bad to want to be rich?

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

In this episode of The Gray Area, guest host Sally Herships interviews philosopher Jason Brennan about his book Why It's OK to Want to Be Rich. They examine why society harbors a deeply conflicted attitude

Key takeaways

• Jason Brennan notes that a typical U.S. middle-class earner ranks in the global top 1-5% due to historical and worldwide living standards.
• Economist Herbert Gintis's experiments demonstrate that individuals from market-oriented societies consistently show higher trust and cooperation rates in economic games than those from non-market backgrounds.

Main topics

• The morality of wanting wealth
• Market cooperation versus personal relationships

Notable quotes

"Money is not itself the problem, but people often do bad things with money."

Conclusion

The episode provides a compelling philosophical and economic framework for reframing wealth accumulation

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:01) Support for The Gray Area comes from Fetch Pet Insurance. Are you a pet owner? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill over $1,000. Always an unwelcome surprise. That's according to a study from a pet insurance company. That's where Fetch Pet comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance for dogs and cats, according to ConsumerAdvocate.org. You get paid back up to 90 % of vet bills at any vet in the U.S. and Canada with claims paid in as little as two days. Go to FetchPet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's FetchPet.com slash save. Speaker 3 (0:47) you want to be rich? What if someone just offered you a check for $15 million, no strings attached? It's a no-brainer, right? The answer is yes. But at the same time, how would you feel about showing off your new money? Maybe a little funny, right? When it comes to money in this country, we often have split personalities. We want it, but we're also taught that money corrupts. that it's the root of all evil. Speaker 3 (1:22) I'm Sally Herships, sitting in for Sean Illing, and this is The Gray Area. Speaker 3 (1:33) My guest today is philosopher Jason Brennan. He's a professor at Georgetown's McDonough School of Business and author of a book with an unforgettable title, Why It's Okay to Want to Be Rich. I invited him on the show to walk me through that idea and maybe even to persuade me. This is an argument I would love to buy into. Jason says we've got wealth all wrong, that we're biased against it, that profit is good, not just for the individual making it, but for society as a whole. But how much wealth is okay in this new world? And if we do get rich, what are our responsibilities? as individuals. Speaker 3 (2:21) Jason, welcome to the show. Thank Speaker 1 (2:23) you for having me. Speaker 3 (2:24) So you wrote a book with a fabulous title, Why It's Okay to Want to Be Rich. And I love what it explains, which is like the schizophrenic nature of our country. On the one hand... Being rich is considered to be gauche, not okay, guilt-inducing, the root of all evil. On the other hand, if you open Instagram or TikTok or social media, it's filled with get-rich-quick schemes. So which is it? What is our country feeling and wanting right now? Speaker 1 (3:00) Yeah, I think this schizophrenic attitude is not just inside the country. It's for every individual one of us. I think we're both. We're all kind of torn in these two directions where we want more money. It's very rare for someone to say no to a raise or to think if only I had an extra like 50 % more income, things would be worse rather than better, right? And at the same time, we feel bad about it. So I really wanted to take a look at why we're torn in these two directions. And I think there is a point to the skepticism. We can all name examples of like miserly attitudes in cases where the desire for money corrupts us and corrupts the people around us and corrupts our institutions. But fundamentally, there is something about money worth wanting. And so a lot of this book is exploring why it makes sense to want to be rich in that sense. And to be clear, too, it's like I'm not here talking about billionaires or multi-deca-millionaires and so on. I'm thinking about ordinary people like the typical sort of upper middle class person in the United States who is not only rich by world standards, but rich by American standards. So when we think about the rich, I'm often thinking about... people like me and people like the typical listener probably to this show who are historically quite rich. You know, should we feel guilty about how much we have and should we feel guilty about wanting more? Speaker 3 (4:14) So you're talking about individuals. Maybe let's start with society as a whole. Why is being rich potentially good for society? Speaker 1 (4:25) Yeah. The funny thing is, I think one of the best defenses of wealth comes from a Marxist philosopher. So there's this philosopher named Jerry Cohen who I've had some, you know, arguments back and forth with over the years. But he says if you think about what money is, it's fundamentally a ticket. Like, he's like, a $20 bill doesn't matter in and of itself, but what it is to have money and to have wealth is to have access to the world. It is a ticket to do things. It is a kind of freedom. The more of it you have, all things equal, the more freedom you have to live a life that might be authentically yours to pursue the things that... define who you are, to meet new people, to see interesting things. The less we have of money, generally speaking, the more our options are sort of set for us by the world and the people around us, unless we tend to be able to live authentically. I don't want to exaggerate that neither would he. there are definitely people who are ensnared by the pursuit of money and it makes their lives worse. But generally speaking, what's good about money isn't the money itself, but that it's fungible with everything else. It's fungible with leisure. It's fungible with travel. It's fungible with education. And further, you know, it doesn't buy happiness, but it protects you against the worst things that tend to create unhappiness. So it's not the key to happiness, but it is sort of an insurance policy against misery. Speaker 3 (5:38) What does it mean to be rich? How are you defining wealth? Speaker 1 (5:43) Yeah, I mean, there's no cutoff number where I can say to be rich means you have exactly, you know, a $1.2 million net worth with the following things brought into consideration. But I think it is helpful to think about how a typical American stands versus world history and versus the world as it stands right now. Taking constant U.S. dollars, whenever I give you a dollar amount in this, I'll try to always use adjusting for inflation and adjusting for the cost of living over time. So if you take current U.S. dollars and you think about what you can buy with that in the United States. The typical person living in England a thousand years ago is living on roughly $1,500 to $2,000 a year. And that's probably an overestimate on my part. You know, throughout most of world history, people are living on a little bit more than what we now consider a dollar a day. People were, generally speaking, really poor. What we consider extreme poverty was the norm for almost all of human history. And that has really only changed in the past couple hundred years. It changed in some places before others. Nowadays, GDP per capita in what's called current U.S. dollars, what we call PPP-adjusted U.S. dollars, which means I'm adjusting for the cost of living, I'm adjusting for inflation, is roughly about $19,000 per person. That's the best it's ever been. So what happens is most people in developed countries like Germany, Japan, or the United States, when they think about the 1%, it's a pretty good chance they're in the global 1%. It doesn't take that much money to be in the top couple percent worldwide. Compared to what world history has been like, even compared to what the world is like today, most people who think of themselves as middle class in developed countries are actually the rich. They're in the top 5%. And even the people we consider poor are usually in the top 20 to 30%. So I think, you know, who's the rich? Rich is always a comparative thing. You know, what we consider wealth today is very different from what people considered wealth back in the past. I remember reading a... bibliography of Cromwell, you know, and it says something like, he was considered very rich because he had six shirts, six shirts in his wardrobe. It's like, I have six shirts that I've never even worn. So the standards keep changing. But I would say, when I'm thinking about what it means to be rich, I think the typical middle-class person in developed country is comparatively quite rich compared to most of history and to most people alive today. Speaker 3 (7:57) So you just said that to be rich, it's always, it's always... wealth is always relative. Is it possible to define rich without that relative comparison? Speaker 1 (8:07) You know, maybe somebody could. And that's a great philosophical question. I didn't really take it up because I just didn't think it was. When I think about the guilt that people have about why, you know, the guilt people have about wanting money and the guilt, the attitudes towards the rich that they have, I think a lot of that applies to most of us. You know, when they look at the rich and go, oh, rich people, they mean people who are like just you know, just loaded and have mansions and horses and like multiple cars and fly a jet, like their own private jet everywhere. When they think about their complaints about those people, a lot of their complaints about them and their worries about them apply to themselves just ever so much more weakly. There's a strong tendency, I think, in the academy for people to criticize ordinary life rather than to defend it. And, you know, to a certain degree, what this book is about is like defending our ordinary intuitions about it's okay to want more. It's okay to... to want a bigger raise. It's okay to have what you have. I Speaker 3 (8:58) mean, I'm okay with wanting more for myself and my family and my friends. But if what you're saying is true, if many of us are rich and don't realize it or don't consider ourselves rich or are just within grasp of being rich, how did we get to this place where we... don't think it's okay for others, because clearly we think it's okay for ourselves? Speaker 1 (9:25) Yeah, that's a great question. I think there's a couple different things that are happening at the same time to sort of diagnose this. One is, I teach these classes on moral psychology. This is the study of how people make moral decisions and moral evaluations. And there's this funny persistent phenomenon where we evaluate other people worse than ourselves. So for instance, you ask people, when you're voting, How do you vote? And they go, well, I vote for justice and the common good. Well, how do other people vote? They vote for their pocketbooks and their own self-interest. When you go to a party as a college student, how much do you drink? I have like three drinks on average. How much are the other people drinking? They're having nine to ten. It's so bad that there's actually a study where they look at prisoners, people who are currently in jail for a felony, and ask them to rate themselves morally compared to not other prisoners, but people at large. And these felons say that they are more moral on average when it comes to honesty and a bunch of other virtues with basically every virtue except for law-abidingness where they think they're about average. So I think part of it is like when we think of our own money, we can read our own hearts and we have like, you know, a kind of nice view of ourselves. When we look at other people's behavior, we're much more inclined to attribute malice or vice to them. That happens irrespective of money. That's just a persistent human trait that we find all over the world. The other thing, though, is I think throughout most of human history, we had extremely exploitative economic systems like feudalism and so on, where it really was like the rich people were typically the knights and the warriors who just kind of like forced the other people to work. And, you know, just. treated them like peasants and so on. And I think a lot of our intellectual apparatus for thinking about money is thinking about, you know, the old nobles versus the old peasants, right? And we might look today and say, why aren't there some people that are kind of like those bad nobles? And there's some people that are kind of like those poor peasants. And we can say interesting things about them. But what happened in the past few hundred years was the emergence of the genuine middle class that doesn't fit into either of those categories quite well. And I guess, I think there's maybe one other final thing, which is that Humans are not supposed to live in these giant societies of a billion people. Like we're trading with billions of people at a time. Even something as simple as like this glass, when you actually look at the genealogy of this glass, you find it's something like 50 million people went into producing this. Only like a couple hundred maybe knew they were making it at the factory. But if you trace out the entire history of everyone who contributed to this, it's something like the scale of 50 million. Our brains are not really set up for that. It's very counterintuitive. We are evolved to live in these family-based clans of roughly 100 members where everything is based on solidarity and common caring. And that's incredibly important. We have clubs and organizations and churches that live off Speaker 3 (12:04) of Speaker 1 (12:04) that. Our families live off of that. But a lot of our moral intuitions are for that type of cooperation. They're not for the extended cooperation that we have in large-scale societies today. I think our brains don't register them quite well. We're sort of naturally suspicious of them because in a sense, we haven't evolved for this. We've only lived this way for 400 or so generations. In the previous 10,000 generations, we were living in these small family clans where a different ethos worked. Speaker 3 (12:29) Speaking of your lovely water glass, which you are now making use of, like that's a really simple example of a product that's really useful. Otherwise, I'd be trying to drink. Right. out of my hands under the faucet. But this is the era of super yachts and tech billionaires. It's also a time when the CEO of a major healthcare corporation was shot in the street and Americans were applauding that. Speaker 3 (13:01) So does wanting money create a more individualistic society? And are there any drawbacks to that? Speaker 1 (13:11) Yeah. You know, I thought the answer