My self-interest is, of course, the same as yours

Chrystia Freeland has written the book Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. She was interviewed by Steve Inskeep on NPR this morning. Much of the interview was about the attitudes Freeland heard as she talked to the super rich. Such things as: How can someone possibly retire on anything less than $10 million?

Many of these super rich voted for Obama and now feel betrayed. A big reason is Obama is now talking about and disputing the idea that the more dollars one has the more virtuous one is. They feel that comment emotionally as a personal threat.

Freeland's worry (which seems to be on display over the last 30 years) is that the rich will use their money to rig the system to benefit themselves.

"You don't do this in a kind of chortling, smoking your cigar, conspiratorial thinking way," she says. "You do it by persuading yourself that what is in your own personal self-interest is in the interests of everybody else. So you persuade yourself that, actually, government services, things like spending on education, which is what created that social mobility in the first place, need to be cut so that the deficit will shrink, so that your tax bill doesn't go up.

I also read the first chapter of the book, which is in the NPR site. Some ideas it explores:

Charity is good. It boosts the ego of the giver and gives points in ethics. But discussion of inequality isn't good because it raises the idea all that wealth may be illegitimate.

We all don't like to talk about income inequality because it implies global capitalism wasn't supposed to work this way. The shift from the idea that capitalism increases the middle class to America of the 1% is so recent, our beliefs in how capitalism is supposed to work haven't caught up with reality.

Even so, capitalism is the best economic system we've developed so far (like democracy is the best political system) in spite of its flaws. We need people with money. So we need to understand people with money. That's why the book was written.