The Poorest Rich Kids in the World

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-poorest-rich-kids-in-the-world-20130812?print=true

by wallflower • 13 years ago

41 36 13 years ago

dkulchenko• 13 years ago

People occasionally scoff at "money doesn't buy happiness", but it's an incredibly true statement.

There are homeless people who are objectively happier (and often, healthier) than some of the richest people in the world.

taeric5• 13 years ago

I feel this needs a ridiculously large citation needed. It is trotted out a ton, but I can't help but hear the lyrics from Everclear's "I will buy you a new life"

    I hate those people who love to tell you
    Money is the root of all that kills
    They have never been poor
    They have never had the joy of a welfare christmas

crgt2• 13 years ago

After reading that article, you still want a citation showing that someone could be homeless and happier than those kids? ReallY? Maybe re-read the article?

cgag• 13 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

NhanH• 13 years ago

Dan Gilbert's "Stumbling on happiness", along with his works. Basically, since you don't have a comparison point between the stuff that you have, and they stuff that you don't have - it won't affect you.

In fact, there are a quick Ted talk about that, you can search for his name.

ijk• 13 years ago

"When plotted against log income, life evaluation rises steadily. Emotional well-being also rises with log income, but there is no further progress beyond an annual income of∼$75,000. Low income exacerbates the emotional pain associated with such misfortunes as divorce, ill health, and being alone. We conclude that high income buys life satisfaction but not happiness, and that low income is associated both with low life evaluation and low emotional well-being."

Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton "High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being" PNAS 2010 107: 16489-16493. http://www.pnas.org/content/107/38/16489

austinz• 13 years ago

I don't know if this was the parent author's intent, but one could very plausibly be homeless by choice, being materially poor and living a life with intentionally few obligations, as opposed to being someone forced onto the streets because of mental illness or financial trouble.

noonespecial• 13 years ago

On the other hand, this story is in Rolling Stone and ostensibly "newsworthy" because money almost always provides insulation against this kind of deprivation.

Go to any large city in the US and you'll find this same story played out countless times with children living in equally terrible, deprived and dangerous situations. It won't be news because their parents are poor.

temphn2• 13 years ago

  The twins' father, Walker Inman, 57, lumbered from the 
  mansion, his tattooed sleeves visible under a black T-
  shirt, drinking his morning rum ... He'd been full of 
  dangerous mischief since he was a child. As a 13-year-old 
  orphan in 1965 taken in by his aunt Doris Duke, Walker – 
  then called "Skipper" – had romped around her lavish 
  14,000-square-foot Hawaiian estate without regard for 
  property or propriety

That single word "orphan" is the most important part of this article. The reason this piece is so bizarre is that the sorts of traits that allow you to build great fortunes in business[1] are anti-correlated with those that result in becoming a tattooed, drunk, abusive, morbidly obese, criminally-inclined drug addict. Put another way, the kind of guy who would build up a fortune like that would be unlikely to have a biological son like this. In America we're supposed to pretend that DNA doesn't matter, and that you can only pass down looks/height and not brains/behavior, but reality doesn't work like that [2,3,4]. Babies put up for adoption at birth in particular tend to disproportionately be children of parents with low impulse control and mental disorders, and at least some of that appears to be due to the genetics of the parents above and beyond the orphanage conditions [5]. Sounds harsh, but good to know if you're considering adopting.

[1] Celebrities and athletes are of course excluded from this sentence. They don't become wealthy through scaling businesses/managing people, and as such have a much higher incidence of behavioral issues. Many NBA and NFL athletes are bankrupt after a few years out of the league, in fact.

[2] http://www.yale.edu/scan/GT_2004_NRN.pdf

[3] http://www.amazon.com/The-Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial/dp/01420...

[4] http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/kalthoff/bio346/PDF/PowerPo...

[5] http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1737667,00.ht...

  The Minnesota psychologist and her colleagues found that 
  disparity could be due as often to innate factors such as 
  perinatal care or his birth parents' genes. "The 
  deleterious effects may quite possibly have come before the 
  adoption ever took place," Keyes, the study's lead 
  researcher, says.

GuiA• 13 years ago

The excerpt you cite is from the first 5% of the article. Have you read the whole thing? There is more than enough evidence in this piece to show that nurture was very much a factor here, regardless of whether nature was or not.

bendoernberg• 13 years ago

Both tattoos and obesity are inextricably tied in with social class; as a general rule, the very wealthy are far less likely to become obese or get tattoos, for a variety of reasons. That leaves "drunk" and "drug addict"; what's your basis for claiming that the children of wealthy businessmen are unlikely to have substance abuse problems?

azernik• 13 years ago

Did you read any of the bits in between your ellipses?

  ...stinking rich from three trust funds: one from his
  father, Walker Inman Sr., heir to an Atlanta cotton
  fortune and stepson to American Tobacco Company founder
  "Buck" Duke; one from his mother, Georgia Fagan; the third
  from his grandmother, Buck's widow Nanaline Duke, who left
  the bulk of her $45 million estate to her little grandson.

The money involved was made by people with the same genes as Walter Inman, Jr.

wavefunction• 13 years ago

And his father also died from "consumption" or "getting too fucked up too often" disease.

I've had some exposure to the "very wealthy" and they're just as fucked up at a rate as someone you might find in the trailer park tradition. It's often a factor of luck.

temphn2• 13 years ago

You know what, looks like you're right on this one and I am wrong. It wasn't clear on a first read whether they were saying "his father" as in "his biological father" or "his adoptive father", but on a second read you're right. I still think the statements hold in their generality but clearly not in this specific case.

hollerith• 13 years ago

That single word "orphan" is the most important part of this article.

Are you sure you are not conflating the concepts "orphan" and "adopted"?

hkmurakami• 13 years ago

Andrew Carnegie write in his essay "wealth" that excessive inheritances can only be a burden to the heirs. this story certainly demonstrates that.

wyager• 13 years ago

No, this story demonstrates that an "excessive" inheritance is a burden to a certain set of heirs. It tells us nothing about the effect of "excessive" inheritances on other heirs.

Let's not take sample sizes of one and use them to justify assertions about large groups, shall we?

RodericDay• 13 years ago

this superficial cynicism really depresses me

I know so many kids toiling away thinking that "there's only the ladder", that the idea that there's happiness outside of money is some sort of opiate to weed out the less driven. ask people who went to prep schools man, ask rich people themselves. money doesn't make people happy.

bilalq• 13 years ago

The article is a lot more readable if you remove print=true from the query string. If you want to avoid the paginated mess, setting font-family to Georgia and width to 60% makes it pretty easy on the eyes as well.

rudedogg• 13 years ago

Born Rich

The film was described as "a documentary on children of the insanely rich, directed by one of their own, Johnson & Johnson Inc. heir Jamie Johnson." It consists primarily of Johnson interviewing his friends and peers about the experience of living life free of financial constraints. These interviews are offset by Johnson's exploration of his own experience and family. By the end of the film, Luke Weil became unhappy with his portrayal and sued unsuccessfully.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/174635

yitchelle• 13 years ago

Posting a youtube link for those not able to access the hulu link (ie you are no in the US).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xhuSxyHWRw

fatjokes2• 13 years ago

I really enjoy the quote from Warren Buffet, who felt the perfect amount to leave children is "enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing."

s_q_b• 13 years ago

Throughout my life, I've had a larger than average exposure to the children of the very wealthy. What strikes me is that they seem afflicted with the same existential angst that plagues us all from time to time. They wonder what everything means, what the point of doing anything at all, much less something great, truly is. In short, they are always in search of meaning, and never find a final goal in which to place their faith.

The main difference is that for you or I, even if we slip into nihilism, depression, or hedonism for temporary spells, reality always demands our attention. Even mere millions last at most years if truly spent with the abandon the "fuck it all" lifestyle requires. For the children of the very wealthy, they can escape into these distractions for years, possibly forever.

Some of these children manage to claw their way free of the meaningless merry-go-round of booze, drugs, sex, travel, and wild purchases. Anecdotally, the things that seem to assist this process are, in no particular order: a family mythology as found in families such as the Rockefellers, newly discovered religious faith, restrictions upon their finances, a hobby or profession with it's own addictive qualities (such as running, or programming), or a significant other that provides a surrogate middle class mindset.

It's a bizarre situation, but wealth can kill just as surely as it can protect. I don't have the answer here, but if you're fortunate enough to make it big, spend some serious time thinking about how to protect your children and your grandchildren from the downside of your success.

taeric5• 13 years ago

The majority of these stories that I am familiar with could have used the "spend some serious time and personal resources on your kids." Money and outside resources seems a poor substitute for good parental relationships.

known• 13 years ago

"The only way to succeed is to make people hate you." --Josef von Sternberg

The Poorest Rich Kids in the World

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