The Perils of Privilege
What the Elon Musk spectacle can teach us about success, failure, and growing up.
A few years ago, I flew first class for the first (and, so far, only) time, the ticket attained through credit-card gaming and a profligate use of air miles. I had a tight connection, and when I reached the gate for the second leg of the journey the plane was already boarding. When I saw the line of waiting passengers, a thought flashed through my mind—I should go to the front.
My better nature kicked in. I got in line and waited my turn to board.
I settled into my comfy seat, wiping my hands with a warm eucalyptus-scented washcloth as the flight attendant set a glass of chilled white wine on my tray. I thought about that momentary feeling of injustice. I shouldn’t have to wait. I’m first class! It amazed me how fast privilege poisons the brain, how all it took was little dish of warm mixed nuts to convince me that I deserved better than my cohorts in coach with their half-cans of Diet Coke.
At the University of California, Irvine, a research team devised a rigged Monopoly game to better understand the way privilege affects people’s mindsets. In the study, strangers were grouped into pairs, and a coin toss determined who would be the “rich” player and who would be the “poor” player. The rich players started the game with twice as much money as the poor ones and received twice as much cash when they passed “Go”—an advantage magnified by the fact that they also moved around the board twice as quickly (they rolled two dice at each turn while their opponents rolled one).
It amazed me how fast privilege poisons the brain, how all it took was little dish of warm mixed nuts to convince me that I deserved better than my cohorts in coach with their half-cans of Diet Coke.
As the game progressed, the advantaged players became louder and ruder. They smacked their pieces on the game board, ate more pretzels, crowed about their winnings, and taunted their opponents for their poor showing. When the rich players invariably won, every one of them attributed their victory to skills rather than to the coin toss. “None, not one, of the rich players attributed their inevitable success in this game to that force of luck that randomly got them that privilege in the first place,” said Professor Paul Piff, who conducted the study.
Wealth and privilege make people confident that they deserve what they have, and it’s true that some high-net-worth individuals are smarter and more disciplined that the average person. But for every Steve Wozniak, there are multiple millionaires and billionaires whose primary talent is manipulating market systems to fatten their bank own accounts. When Disney pays CEO Bob Iger 1,424 times more than the median employee salary, it’s clear that the payment-to-value metric is off, as the ongoing screenwriters and actors strike is making clear.