I get conflicted feelings about this. On the one hand it's highly unlikely anyone in that tower would get a shred of empathy from the common man (and highly unlikely this is even one of their 5 other homes), but on the other it's just a damn shame that some of the most prominent landmarks in the greatest city in the world are crappy places to live at. I'm not of the opinion they're eyesores - the nyc Skyline was stagnant for decades until these needles came in. One way or another progress in that regard is good?
> I'm not of the opinion they're eyesores - the nyc Skyline was stagnant for decades until these needles came in. One way or another progress in that regard is good?
What “good” does a skyline do for society? The enormous costs to build super talls would go much further in myriad other ways, even just by making a few tall or many regular size buildings. Very far from progress if you as me.
Actually, I would take the construction of a novel building just to give views and prestige to less than one hundred families to be evidence of societal regression, since it can be used as a proxy for extreme wealth inequality.
> The enormous costs to build super talls would go much further in myriad other ways, even just by making a few tall or many regular size buildings.
Note that these supertalls only exist in the first place because it's artificially difficult to build regular-sized buildings in Manhattan. It's very unlikely anybody would have bothered building anything in this specific form if not for the onerous zoning codes the developers were skirting when they designed them.
I'm not sure that article supports your conclusion. They made oversized mechanical floors to evade height limits. They could have made normal sized floors and still complied with zoning regulations. If the zoning regulations had permitted denser buildings, it would still be just as tall, but with more interior floors. Making the building ultra tall was the point, not an accidental quirk of zoning.
Yes, of course they wanted the building to be tall. The claim is that it wouldn't be super-tall, skinny, and with so much empty space, if not for the particulars of NYC zoning law. If they were allowed to make a normally-proportioned building on an entire lot, then they most likely would have done that. But they aren't.
You can make a living defending corruption, helping the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer.
The problems of the wealthy are as the problems of a tick sucking the lifeblood from a host. Rest assured that extending them empathy and compassion will be a strictly one-sided arrangement when push comes to shove.
I've worked with and lived around both poor and relatively rich people, but I can't say that the rich stand out as lacking empathy or compassion specifically. From my experience I would say the opposite is true, creating "anti network-effects" for many poor people.
There seems to be growing resentment of "the rich" recently, but I believe that's misplaced. Things will get worse for "the poor" until the cause is diagnosed correctly.
There have been some studies done on this (for example [0] and [1]) and it does seem that wealthy people are less compassionate.
Anecdotally my experience aligns with the findings in the studies - my richer friends seem far less likely to tip well or give money to a panhandler than my poorer friends who tend to be more inclined to share the wealth, when they have it.
The top richest Americans have sucked out all the extra value created in society for the last two generations, while offloading a great deal of risk onto individuals, who are the least likely to be able to bear it.
Overall, we are in the process of destroying our ecosystem, and again, the richest people on the planet consume and waste literally _orders of magnitude_ more than the poorest.
You having met some rich people who are also nice is just an anecdote.
Well, if you want to resent rich people for being rich, that's your prerogative, but I don't think there's much benefit in seeing it that way.
You mentioned planet ecosystem and consumption, so let's use energy as an example. The richest people consume much more per capita than everyone else, but still represent a tiny fraction of overall usage. So no matter how you deal with the rich, it won't solve that problem. Meanwhile, everyone acts in their own self-interest, so you have developing nations increasing their per capita energy consumption as their standard of living increases, and overall energy use goes up. The planet doesn't know the difference in who used to energy and whether it was justified/deserving/whatever. The result is the same.
So what's the solution? You could decrease wasteful consumption (commuting, global shipping as labor arbitrage) and you can change how energy is generated (i.e. renewables), which you could lump into political and technological changes. The easiest way to do either is to align people's incentives so they'll naturally drive those changes, since again people act in their own self-interest. Some rich people will lose out in that transition and try to oppose changes, others will benefit and try to further them, but the net effect isn't necessarily negative. And of course energy use is just one example here.
So these problems are kind of orthogonal to how you feel about rich people, meaning that if you let yourself get distracted with that, you'll have little impact.
I don't know that the rich are above-average in lacking empathy or compassion. Though there does seem to be a correlation between wealth and ruthlessness, which isn't exactly the same thing.
However, when we see bad behavior from the rich, like the Koch brothers, their wealth amplifies the bad behavior and it seems to have an outsized effect upon the world.
okay. whatever particular wealthy that you are thinking about is not all or likely not most.
I would also like to point out that everyone's anecdotes about "their wealthy friends not tipping or dropping change to beggars" are not the same people you are thinking about.
Making a living off “rich people problems” has nothing to do with empathy. If their problems put food on my table you best believe I’m going to cater to their bullshit. If it makes me rich even better
I can settle with wealth redistribution. Or, perhaps, if the rich are so much better than us mere mortals, they can play the game with handicaps, the same handicaps mere mortals have.
