Secret Fears of the Super-Rich

[Newsjock]

Source: The Atlantic

... For four years, the Gates Foundation has supported an effort by the center to determine exactly how the American wealthy think and live—and in particular how, when, and to what degree they make the shift from accumulating fortunes to giving them away philanthropically. (The John Templeton Foundation, which is concerned with spiritual matters, kicked in additional funding to study correlations between wealth, philanthropy, and religion.) The project has produced one of the most remarkable documents in the center’s history: a survey that invited the very rich to write freely about how prosperity has shaped their lives and those of their children. From the anonymity of their home computers, the respondents wrote anything from a few words to a few pages, volunteering not only their net worth and sources of wealth but also their innermost hopes, fears, and anxieties.

The responses, which run to 500 pages and fill three plastic binders on the fifth floor of Boston College’s McGuinn Hall, constitute what the center’s director, the sociologist Paul G. Schervish, calls “an extraordinary sample of confession, memoir, and apologia” from the super-rich. (The researchers admit that this sample is not representative, being inevitably skewed toward those wealthy people who are willing to offer their confessions to a computer screen.) Roughly 165 households responded, 120 of which have at least $25 million in assets. The respondents’ average net worth is $78 million, and two report being billionaires. The goal, say the survey’s architects, was to weed out all but those at or approaching complete financial security. Most of the survey’s respondents are wealthy enough to ensure that in any catastrophe short of Armageddon, they will still be dining on Chateaubriand while the rest of us are spit-roasting rats over trash-can fires.

The results of the study are not yet public, but The Atlantic was granted access to portions of the research, provided the anonymity of the subjects was strictly maintained.

Read more: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/secret-fears-of-the-super-rich/8419/

[Name removed]

1. Deleted message

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[FiveGoodMen]

2. Way past time for that!

Really.

Nothing else will work.

[mike_c]

3. +1

Eat the rat bastards and leave the rats alone!

[fascisthunter]

4. So, the rich and wealthy are like spoiled drug addicts

what they have is never enough, and because of that, we must struggle while they live a life of leisure.

[razorman]

5. So what are they afraid of, being downgraded to merely "incredibly wealthy"?