Rich work harder than the poor (David Brooks)

[DemoTex]

Through some screw-up in the moral superstructure, we now have a plutocratic upper class infused with the staid industriousness of Ben Franklin, while we are apparently seeing the emergence of a Wal-Mart leisure class — devil-may-care middle-age slackers who live off home-equity loans and disability payments so they can surf the History Channel and enjoy fantasy football leagues.

For the first time in human history, the rich work longer hours than the proletariat.

Today’s super-wealthy no longer go off on four-month grand tours of Europe, play gin-soaked Gatsbyesque croquet tournaments or spend hours doing needlepoint while thinking in full paragraphs like the heroines of Jane Austen novels. Instead, their lives are marked by sleep deprivation and conference calls, and their idea of leisure is jetting off to Aspen to hear Zbigniew Brzezinski lead panels titled “Beyond Unipolarity.” (More of this drivel, if you can stomach it)

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/08/03/opinion/03brooks.h...
New York Times print edition 8/3/2006 (P. A23)
I'll post a non-NYT Select link when I see one

Brooks is so full of shit that his eyes are brown. WTF IS his reality? Looks to me like his only motivation is the ratcheting up of class warfare. Those fuckers want all-war, all the time .. including an all-out war against the "poor" (read: everyone who isn't a millionaire GOP donor, especially recently laid-off middle-aged men) in this country.

[YDogg]

1. george bush springs to mind. not.

[unpossibles]

2. what?!?

I would argue that the almost-wealthy work their butts off a lot of times, but the super-rich? Money makes money - it doesn't take a genius to figure out how.

[alarimer]

41. Paris Hilton has never worked a day in her life

Yet by virtue of her family, she is a gazillionaire. Nice work if you can get it.

[acmavm]

3. Geez, I wish I could make a list of the people who need a damn

good ass whuppin' and be there to watch it happen.

[ThomCat]

4. It's the same old same old.

Wealthy people are constantly trying to explain why they deserve to be wealthy. They're smarter, they work harder, they're the only ones who know what to do with all that wealth, they're blessed by God, whatever.

[indepat]

5. Twice as hard for hundreds of times as much

[n2doc]

6. I just knew that effin' articue on men who refuse to work

would be puffed up by these bozos. Yep, Americans are lazy arrogant sob's who don't want to work. Except for the vaunted, wonderful, saintly ultra rich....and the illegal aliens that they hire.

I'll tell you, most of these rich fuckers seem to have an awfull lot of time to play Golf. About 800,000 Golf Courses built in the last decade in America...

[ShortnFiery]

7. Yeah, that Paris Hilton is making grand contributions to society ...

While mentally firing on two to three cylinders.

If she's doing "Herd Werk" then throw some my way.

[ptolle]

29. but then

You might argue that in her own way she's working harder than Bobo, and contributing more to the society.

[yurbud]

31. Dems should call inheritance tax the Paris Hilton tax and every time

the GOP gives the rich a tax cut, pay Paris to come thank them personally.

[Jim__]

8. From a recent interview of Paris Hilton.

"I've made, like, 200 million dollars (£107 million) in the last year, while J-Lo's only made 150 million dollars," she explained.

"I get paid 500,000 dollars (£266,500) to go to Las Vegas or Japan and wave at crowds or go to a party. All the time. Only this week I met a family at the airport who wanted me to drop in to their daughter's 16th birthday party for 100,000 dollars (£53, 310). Because I'm her idol. So I will. I'll take her a present, though.

"I went to Austria recently and got paid 1 million (£53 million) just to wave at a crowd of people there. I had to say 'hi' and tell them why I loved Austria so much," she said.

More...

David Brooks showing his usual insight.

I wonder if freepers believe this shit about themselves.

[DemoTex]

9. Paid to wave ...

Sounds like the Queen's gig.

[pooja]

10. time is relative here... if you look at history centuries ago... women

did sit around and needlepoint. learn how to play piano to entertain. there were summers in town and winters in the country. The elite lived off their serfs. they did not work in the the same sense that we do today.

[TrogL]

23. Most women were basically slaves

cooking, cleaning, raising kids, farming, dealing with livestock

[Demeter]

26. Rich Women, Maybe--Birds In a Gilded Cage

died in childbirth just as much, though.

[raccoon]

37. The women you are referring to were the ones who were well-off,

a distinct minority in any century, as the well-off are today.

Most women in past generations worked like mules, cooking from scratch three meals a day, cleaning without the help of any appliances, manually washing clothes, taking care of a houseful of kids, helping with the crops/livestock, etc.

[CBHagman]

40. You're talking about a tiny percentage of the population...

...and not, by any stretch of the imagination, most of the population and definitely not most women. If anything, most of our ancestors worked longer days than we do now, including the children. The notion that our forebears were all sitting at the spinet in the parlor and having the servants pack their clothes for the house party this weekend is as extreme as David Brooks's assertion that the rich are all overworked and the poor and middle-class are slackers.

[Beetwasher]

11. He Deserves A Good Smack Upside the Head w/ A 2x4

It's easy to write this drivel because all you have to do is just make shit up out of thin air. Of course, he has absolutely nothing to back up anything he says. We just have to take his word for it. There are no adjectives to adequately describe what a filthy piece of human garbage this guy is.

[Xipe Totec]

12. Yes, they're hard at work...

In golf courses because, hey, that's where all the execs hobnob.

In yachts because, again, you got to go where your clients are.

In ball rooms, concerts, fund raisers, dinners, theaters, sports fishing, jet setting...

Hey, gimme some of that kind of work, and I'll gladly do it 24x7.

Lets see how long one of these rich fat fuckers last bailing hay, digging ditches, pouring concrete...

Lets see how long they last doing real work.

[DemoTex]

16. And the rich can write-off country clubs dues, yachts, jets, etc,: Why?

Because it is HARD WORK to work while you play. Especially when the poorer taxpayer is footing some of the bill. The rich love to work while they play. Number one, it provides a great big fat tax write-off for the play-toy being used. Number two, it assuages their consciouses .. uh, forget number two.

[underpants]

36. Got the link yet?

Progressive American doesn't carry his nonsense

http://64.226.238.78/PA/others.shtml

Don't ask me why I want to read the whole thing.

I will be attending a happy hour with some execs of a Fortune 500 company this very afternoon. None of them strike me as being all that hard working or in anyway overly capable.

[jobycom]

13. I'm sure if he looks hard enough he can find some cases where that's true

But unless he's got some statistics to back it up, he's just spouting nonsense like the drunks in the VIP lounge at the country club.

[bluerum]

14. !? gag puke vomit

[SoftUnderbelly]

15. the american dream

not sure if im going off on one with this, but it really pisses me off when people say rich people are rich because they worked hard for it, and if you worked hard too you could be rich aswell.

well my dad made grinding wheels in a factory for 25 years (before being made redundant and now works in a warehouse) and worked really fucking hard for the whole family. there was no way on earth he could become rich no matter how much effort he put in.

the truth of the matter is some poor people who work hard may get a lucky break and get in to the 'big time'. maybe one in a million will achieve that. but the rest of the poor will work as hard as possible and still never 'make it' because the nature of our society wont allow that to happen.

if anyone who is rich says they work hard for their money should try spending some time working in a factory (while we have some left)

[Patchuli]

19. You know, while I agree with your sentiment,

your language is appalling. Could you lose the 'c' word, please? It's offensive to us poor women too. Thanks.

[SoftUnderbelly]

20. sure

not had anyone (women included) complain before about that word, maybe we just have filthier mouths in england

[Patchuli]

24. Thanks!

I'm not a prude but that word does bother me. That was thoughtful of you to edit.

[alarimer]

42. I think it actually means something else in England

than it does here. Correct me if I am wrong, usually here it refers to a woman and is worse than calling her a bitch, but I have heard the British use it differently.

[calico1]

17. He's right.

There is a golf course near me and you should see how hard some of those golfers work!

[jmowreader]

18. This "Wal-Mart leisure class" doesn't exist

except in the minds of the Republican Party.

You cannot get a home equity loan if your entire income is disability payments. No banker in America is that stupid.

There are probably seven classes in this country--the Homeless, the Working Poor, the Lower Middle Class, the Upper Middle Class, the Must-Work Rich, the Do-Work Rich and the Idle Rich. It's the Must-Work Rich David Brooks writes about.

The Must-Work Rich contains people like Bob Nardelli, CEO of Home Depot. He makes $25 million a year for running a company that employs 375,000 people all over the planet. He's got a nice lifestyle with a big house and a Mercedes, but if he got thrown out of Home Depot, he's not in any position to just fall back on his assets and cruise. He'd be a middle-class citizen in ten years if he suddenly lost his job.

The Waltons of Arkansas are definitely Do-Work Rich. Say they got kicked out of Wal-Mart--it could happen, the guy who founded Habitat for Humanity was thrown out on his ass a few years ago. They are sitting on enough of Sam's money that they wouldn't have to work another day in their lives if they chose not to. They work not out of fiscal need, but for some psychological reason.

I know there are people like Brooks describes. So do you. Look at the Wall Street banks. They're full of people who cannot just stop working if they want to maintain any semblance of what they've decided is a normal lifestyle. Most corporate officers, Bill Gates and Dick Cheney excepted, are the same way. They NEED to work.

But trust me on this: there is still a Leisure Class. It's just that the Republican Party doesn't want to admit it, because that's a third of the GOP.

[undergroundpanther]

21. I don't see any rich

people sweating their debutante asses off working on a construction site,I don't see any well off people scrubbing toilets,I don't see any rich people out in the sun picking fruit with mexican slave labor in florida yet.I don't see any rich boys made into cubicle slaves or sitting on a telephone all day. Until I see a millionaire sweeping a street or waiting tables,the rich are truly a bunch of lazy parasites who take far more away from others than they give back to others. .Having a wealthy class costs society too much,and this kindness we show them makes the ones among us who are poor suffer in ways the middle class can't comprehend..The class system is the biggest scam ever pulled. A lie designed to convince ignorant but good hearted working people wealthy people are "needed". Besides most rich people don't earn it,they are BORN into wealth or they marry into wealth.They do not work,they hire other people to do work, if they work at all it is schmoozing,parties,firing people, pushing numbers around a few hours a day to squeeze more profits out of the duped workers and consumers and get paid way too much for it..We do not need an upper class. We need equality and human rights. We don't have to excuse financial abuse and bullshit out of the few rich thugs in suits you know.Societies would be way better off without rich people. Because we would all live well if income was distributed more evenly.Stratification via income or resources sucks and it is a lie and it is evil..

[NavyDavy]

32. you forgot rich kids not doing their part in fighting

the war they so wholeheartedly support, because b**h gives then so many tax breaks!

[raccoon]

38. Right on! nt

[shrike]

22. Only David Brooks

I read the article he references, and while I had mixed feelings about the two men featured (and you know they'd pick the worst cases) the notion that there is a whole class of people out there living on disability is a crock of the foulest-smelling shit.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to get on disability? I know people who tried for years and then gave up. I know a man with a degenerative illness, in his 40s, totally unhireable despite his two degrees (in part because deteriorating nerves make him walk and talk funny) and he only gets partial disability -- because he is only partially disabled, so sez the government. He can still "work."

Another thing no one ever seems to mention is the number of "older" people blackballed not only for their age, but for health conditions. I know a superb former executive, woman in her 50s, who was downsized after a company merger. She was told, on the QT of course, that her serious brush with cancer put off potential hirers -- too much medical liability.

Same thing happened with a friend of ours -- brought practically back from the dead by an experimental cancer treatment that worked. Never again could he find a job -- he was lucky, though, had a family business to go into and has done a bang-up job running it; he'd have been an asset to any company if they'd only been smart enough to hire him. Again, he was told, on the QT, that employers were frightened by his medical history.

"Isn't that discrimination?" I said. He looked at me, sadly, and said, "Try proving that."

[Demeter]

25. What a Load Of You-Know-What

(It cooled down, so I'll make the effort to be G rated).

This Brooks idiot is due for a major comeuppance--and I want to be there when it happens.


And as for those hard-working rich folks---how many of them end up in jail? It's really hard to steal that much money and not attract the attention of the DA.

[IntiRaymi]

27. NY Times wants me to PAY for this drivel?

If the New York Times is out to play the game of consent manufacture, then they made a bad mistake by placing their #1 propagandaists behind the curtain of a payment scheme.

[oppositionmember]

28. The new mythology...

which holds that bond traders work harder than trash collectors, night cleaners, etc. Those Aspen seminars are *so* much work...

[yurbud]

30. the right wing welfare queen myth just got expanded to middle class

[cobalt1999]

33. more likely the rich wanna-bes work harder.

I know in my company, I turned down the career path to VP because it would require 24/7 availability, 18 hour days, weekends, vacations where you are on email/conference calls all day. Sure, I could have quadrupled my current salary and if that was my life's motivation I would do it.

IMHO, the ones working the hardest are the ones trying to go up the ladder while there are those who are happy where they are (rich, middle, poor) who work hard but not AS hard.

[droidamus2]

34. Sure...

I think the big problem here is the definition of work. Is all 'employment' or money making activity work? If I am a musician and I get paid well to do what I love is that truly 'work'? If I am an executive who spends a lot of time having meetings (where underlings who did the real 'work' give me all the information) or networking with other executives am I really doing 'work'? If I lay asphalt in 100 degree heat all day is that 'work'? I think physical labor done in order to feed and clothe your family definitely qualifies as work, damn hard work actually. Doing hard physical labor that you like doing (farming) is hard work too. I think employment doing something you would rather not be doing is considered 'work'. I would even say middle management is work because of all the stress involved in trying to keep those above and below you happy is work. Doing what you would do even if it didn't pay as much (artistic people), doing 'think' work (executives) or simply making money off of money is not 'work'. It takes time out of your day and in some cases may be stressful but the perks more than make up for that and as others have pointed out these people seem to be very adept at mixing their 'work' with their fun an option not usually open to those lower on the economic scale. I do feel sorry for all those hard working rich people that have to go home to their over-sized homes or to their vacation homes in their new $100,000.00 + vehicles on their 4 week vacation? Hell no!!!

[CBHagman]

35. A "trend" based on exactly two anecdotal examples?

What an insult it is to anyone with a regular job to see further evidence of David Brooks's utter laziness, feeble intellect, and basic misanthropy on display in yet another poorly written column. How considerate of him to summon up compassion for the people with the top 1 percent of household incomes.

And what's that bit at the end about women in the Hamptons sleeping with the guys who renovate their houses? Again, one wonders what kind of world David Brooks lives in. If he would condescend to visit with those of us on the commuter bus, taking the kids to the doctor, and watching the sorry state of our 401(k)s, perhaps he would register what is happening. However, I'm not going to hold my breath.

[yellowcanine]

39. Has David Brooks ever worked hard enough to soil his hands? Or has

he always managed to "get paid" for acting smarmy on TV and writing nasty little pieces about people he has never met?