Bill, Melinda, and the Burden of Grand Fortune

All relationships, not just romantic couplings, tend to be twisted by wealth. Rich people “possess and enjoy early,” as novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald famously pointed out, “and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful.”

Bill and Melinda Gates, as a couple, did their best not to become hard and cynical. They devoted substantial chunks of their time to philanthropy. Now giving, of course, can certainly be a wonderful source of joy, perhaps the greatest source of joy of all, and the wealthy, by dint of their fortunes, certainly have more to give than anyone else. But the dollars the wealthy can so easily afford to give too often bring no great joy.

For the wealthy, giving can become just another burden, partially because nearly everyone they encounter expects them to give. Billionaire Larry Tisch, a one-time fixture on the Forbes 400 list of America’s richest, often complained he received “thirty requests for money a day.” That constant drumbeat of entreaties makes giving an obligation, not a source of satisfaction. If you resist that obligation, you’ll be resented. If you accept that obligation, then you start feeling resentful. You gave because you felt forced.

Over the course of a wealthy person’s lifetime, the resentments, the frustrations, the burdens add up. For George Bernard Shaw, the most acclaimed playwright of his time, the mix did not paint a pretty picture.

“You can easily find people who are ten times as rich at sixty as they were at twenty,” Shaw would note in his seventies, “but not one of them will tell you that they are ten times as happy.”

Some exceptionally rich Americans consciously set out to overcome the burdens and strains that must always come with great wealth. These affluent steel themselves against wealth’s temptations. They set out to lead normal lives. Some of them even somewhat succeed. Mitchell Fromstein, the CEO of Manpower Inc., ended the 1990s living in the same four-bedroom suburban Milwaukee home he and his wife had purchased back in the mid 1970s, before Fromstein started pulling in several million a year. He was driving a twelve-year-old Mercedes when the Wall Street Journal profiled him in 1999.

“I’m not trying to keep up with anybody,” the 71-year-old explained. “We don’t need a lot of things to be happy.”

Any wealthy person in America could follow that sort of path. But hardly any do. Why not? If enormous wealth makes for such a burden, as so many sages over the years have contended, then why do so few wealthy people ever attempt to put that burden down? America’s sociologists of wealth have an answer. Grand private fortune, they contend, may indeed poison normal human relationships. But grand private fortune also empowers, on a variety of intoxicating fronts.

Occasionally, of course, a wealthy person will resist those seductions. Back in 1999, for instance, a Michigan-based construction mogul, Bob Thompson, sold his asphalt and paving business and shared the $130-million proceeds from the sale with his 550 employees.

“What was I going to do with all that money anyway?” asked Thompson. “There is need and then there is greed. We all need certain basic comforts, and beyond that it becomes ridiculous.”

Why can’t all rich people be like that, we wonder. If we happened to become rich, we tell ourselves, we would certainly be like that. Nonsense. If we became rich, we would feel the same burdens rich people feel — and be seduced by the same pleasures. The wisest among us, people like the essayist Logan Pearsall Smith, have always understood this reality.

“To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave,” as Smith wrote in 1931, “is like supposing that we could drink all day and keep absolutely sober.”

“I have known some drunks who were happy at times,” the philosopher Philip Slater added half a century later, “but I’ve known no one who devoted a long life to alcohol and didn’t suffer from it, and I believe the same to be true for wealth.”

Still, as George Bernard Shaw observed in the 1920s, some wealthy people doseem to be able to live lives largely trouble-free.

“Perhaps you know some well-off families who do not seem to suffer from their riches,” Shaw noted. “They do not overeat themselves; they find occupations to keep themselves in health; they do not worry about their position; they put their money into safe investments and are content with a low rate of interest; and they bring up their children to live simply and do useful work.”

In other words, concluded Shaw, the happy rich “do not live like rich people at all.” They “might therefore,” he concluded, “just as well have ordinary incomes.”

And if they did, we might all be happier.