Upstairs, downstairs: Not only are the very rich getting ever richer, but they are also increasingly cut off from the common experience of those who are obliged to do things differently.
Since they have no need to interact with less prosperous members of their community at all, they know increasingly little about us. They can, if they choose, turn their backs on the lives and circumstances of the rest of us. [...]
If increasing numbers of the wealthy never take public transport, never sit in a cinema audience or a doctor's surgery, or shop in the High Street during normal opening hours, that sense of the general good involving everyone is lost.
The danger is that, confined within the CCTV-monitored walls of their palatial mansions, the rich stand apart from those ordinary kinds of social bond which bind communities together, so that they have absolutely no idea what it means - let alone what it feels like - to be poor.
[act.: Age of Riches - Challenges of $600-a-Session Patients: Dr. Michael H. Stone, a psychiatrist affiliated with Columbia, said that the preponderance of patients with self-made fortunes, many made at a relatively young age, marked a striking shift.
“It used to be that my patients were the children of the rich: inheritors, people who suffered from the neglect of jet-setting parents or from the fear that no matter what they did, they would never measure up to their father’s accomplishments,” he recalled. “Now I see so many young people — people in their 30s and 40s — who’ve made the money themselves.”
Dr. Stone said those two kinds of patients tended to have different problems: “In my experience, there was a high incidence of depression in the people who were born rich. And by contrast, the people today who are making a fortune are so often narcissistic in a way that excludes depression.”]
