Three Points on Wealth, Burning Man, and the Bay Area
Picking up a running conversation with the Tanzania-based entrepreneur Alexander Rapp about the recurring claim — common in 2013 progressive media — that Burning Man had become a debauched playground for the “rich.” Alyssa pushes back on three fronts: that Americans badly miscalibrate who actually counts as rich; that the relevant comparison class for Burning Man is other large-scale creative projects, not the median American; and that the Bay Area tech elite has installed itself as a fake 1% while ignoring the real one.
Point 1: We Americans have some serious messed-up notions about who is rich and who is poor. We see that, for Burning Man, it is described as a “party for rich people” and how “no poor people go” and how we should all feel guilty for being rich and excluding poor people, even when the income of the median Burner is less than $50K , and even when virtually everything about the event is obviously done on a shoestring . If you go to Burning Man and look around, there are huge numbers of tents and RVs and rental trucks and things which are within the means of the median American , but little in the way of multistory structures or large-business-scale logistics or heavy industrial machinery or other things which are way over the average person’s budget. (Yes these things exist, but their number per capita is quite low.) Meanwhile, we are also constantly told that teachers are poor and we need to pay teachers more and they’re barely getting by and low teacher salaries are making us all stupid and etc. etc. etc., even though the median teacher makes $55K, or more than the median Burner.
Or you see people talking about “old people in poverty”, like Laura’s parents, who think of themselves as poor while effectively having a six figure income (calculated by how much they would get if they used their assets to purchase lifetime annuities at current market rates), without ever having to work again . The Google programmer making six figures thinks they are part of the 1% and is constantly told about social entrepreneurship and how they have a duty to help the poor, while the BART worker making six figures thinks they are barely getting by and needs another set of 8% annual raises. I apologize for ranting about this, but it does get me upset. I consider it self-explanatory where all this propaganda comes from and who benefits from it.
Point 2: While it is true that the mean Burner is wealthier than the mean American and much wealthier than the mean sub-Saharan African, this obscures the very important point that among the set of people who are doing things that impressive , the average Burner has no money. If you compare to other projects that were done largely for the sake of being visually impressive — e.g. the Burj Khalifa, or the latest Hollywood super special effects, or those giant sculptures that that Spanish guy doing the PATH station builds with government money — it’s like Primer vs.
Avatar . Doing Primer on a five-figure budget speaks much more to the skills of those doing it than throwing huge piles of money at problems until they get solved, and saying that Burning Man is all rich people takes away from that.
Point 3: Related to Point 1, the Bay Area seems to be in the strange situation of realizing the income inequality problem, but then setting themselves up as a sort of fake 1% while not noticing the real 1%. As I noted to McKrizzles, the Silicon Valley elite controls hundreds of billions of dollars, but that is a small fraction of the tens of trillions controlled by the mainstream American elite. They think their investment banker friends are “rich”, and never notice the 100x gap between them and the 50-somethings who manage them; they think that VCs are “rich”, while never noticing the trillion-dollar pension and mutual funds that might put half a percent into VC as a blue-sky gamble; they see the tenured professor making three times as much as them, and never stop to notice the college’s multibillion-dollar endowment fund.