These are tough times for the outrageously wealthy. Instead of the aspirational Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous exaltation of yesteryear, our popular image of the country's richest citizens now looks more like a reality show about spoiled, mean people.
First, Berkshire Hathaway's (NYSE: BRK-A)(NYSE: BRK-B) Warren Buffett made a high-profile pronouncement in The New York Times: Our society needs to stop "coddling" the wealthy by shielding them from tax burdens that the middle class has been forced to bear, at much greater relative financial sacrifice.
Later in his piece, Buffett did say that the megarich he knows are "by and large … very decent people" willing to pay more taxes. Regardless, Buffett openly called out our society's tendency to let rich people off the hook, and glorify them regardless of their conduct. Although rich people may feel that it's unfair for people now to turn around and criticize them, our wealthiest citizens often feed the fire with their own problematic behavior.
Dog eat dog
In simplest terms, mean people tend to make more money. That's the finding of a study presented at the annual meeting for the Academy of Management, as the Wall Street Journal reported. Mean men apparently earn about 18% more in salary than their kinder counterparts. Mean women have a harder time than their cruel male counterparts, but still take home about 5% more pay than more agreeable females.
The news gets worse. The Association for Psychological Science recently reported that the rich tend to have less empathy than the rest of us. They don't really have to rely on others, so they never really learn to care about others. Instead, they become financial hoarders, and they often aren't as philanthropic as they could be. Ouch.
Heroes
Of course not all rich people lack empathy or conscience. Take Starbucks' (Nasdaq: SBUX) CEO Howard Schultz, who grew up in the projects in Brooklyn. His company provides health care benefits to workers because Schultz knows how badly it hurt his family when his father injured himself, lost his job, and had no benefits.
And of course, Warren Buffett's a different kind of billionaire. In 2006, he started giving away the fortune he's generated through Berkshire Hathaway. Most of his gifts are slated for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which focuses on global health and improving education.
Still, our culture has tended to exalt the decadent, non-empathetic members of the upper crust over those who exhibit more noble behavior. Why would anybody in their right mind defend nasty, money-grubbing, selfish behavior? We've got to stop.
Zeroes
Those of us who defend strong corporate governance keep a close eye on CEO pay, which is too often outrageously disconnected from any notion of true performance. Warren Buffett may have talked about the "coddled" rich avoiding tax sacrifice, but many wealthy CEOs don't seem to feel particularly driven to endure much financial sacrifice in their roles in the marketplace, either.
Last year, The Institute for Policy Studies pointed out that "lay-off leaders" -- companies that jettisoned the most workers after the financial crisis -- had CEOs who took home 42% more pay than peers in 2009. Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ), Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ), and American Express (NYSE: AXP) were among the companies called to task.
Pardon me for saying so, but it seems to take a certain lack of empathy to rake in millions when thousands of workers lost their livelihoods on your watch. There's little notion of shared sacrifice in the midst of hardship, and these days, hardships are getting worse and worse for more Americans.
Those poor rich people
Wealthy people are increasingly suffering an image problem, but it's partially their fault for not acting a little more decently in times of crisis. Corporate boards can cut CEO pay, and I'm pretty sure that CEOs can also request to slash their own pay levels.
Shareholders also share the blame. For too long, they've defended high CEO pay as a given, not a reward for sound operational performance. Again, that somehow celebrates the super-rich as beyond the same standards the rest of us must follow.
In the discussion about what is rich and what is poor, hopefully our culture can start realizing that the "richest" folks contribute the most to a better world overall, and think about somebody other than themselves during the most difficult times. Those "poor" rich people indeed.
Check Fool.com every Wednesday and Friday for Alyce Lomax's columns on environmental, social, and governance issues.
