#33 - Pulling Themselves Up By the Boostraps
New York Military Academy
Price: $221,250
Rich people love to tell anyone that will listen that they are self-made men and women. To the average Joe this means starting with nothing, sometimes less than nothing, before emerging as successful members of society with a life much better than before. To a rich person, self-made typically means starting with little more than boarding school education, a family fortune of $1 million to $10 million and little or no reliance on maids, butlers and nannies.
The annals of the rich are filled with hard luck stories of having to summer in Cape Cod while their wealthy friends were in The Hamptons and parents sending the children to boarding school where lump crab salad was only served on the second Friday of every month. Despite these horrific upbringings that remind us of Oliver Twist, L’il Orphan Annie and 101 Dalmatians, these deprived men and women still managed to pull themselves up and succeed in spite of their dark pasts. In 2007 Forbes took the opportunity to showcase twenty of America’s richest men in a segment called the “Secrets Of The Self-Made”, Donald Trump is the poster child for the article. His rise to the top was accelerated at age 13 by attending the New York Military Academy where they “make good kids better”. The cost of becoming better; tuition, as of July 2009, was $33,425 and $36,875 per year for domestic and international students respectively. He later attended Wharton, one of America’s premiere schools for finance and economics. Also on Forbes’ list is Ken Fisher; his story starts after working in the investment business under his father Philip A. Fisher, a noted money manager, author and bearer of a middle initial. Ken then clawed his way up from the tough streets of San Francisco’s financial district to start his own investment firm before making his first billion.
In no way should any of this be taken as a slight against the hard work, creativity, instinct, intelligence, determination and self-professed luck that it takes to become wealthy. Each of the men on the list, and there are plenty that did come from humble beginnings, moved the bar significantly from where they started. The fact remains that some rich people love to create myths around their success when the fact is they began their careers with a bit of a boost but I suppose that doesn’t make for as compelling a story. After all, Horatio Alger, Jr would not have been as popular if his protagonists started in the suburbs with Mom driving them to soccer practice.
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Stuff Rich People Love 
this is stupid
A fairly wealthy older White guy once told me on the train, “If a White guy tells you he worked hard to get where he is he is only telling a half truth. Truth is yeah he worked hard; working someone else to do his job for him.” I was awe struck but it made sense. I’m not mad at rich people because I understand this is how it works in nature. You have the Alphas, Betas and Omegas of class. Everyone has a part, but at least many of us have a chance to change our status.
Ecology and human rights issues aside (though as important as they are), I rather stock rich people in this country and wage thefinancial war than stock nukes and shed blood. The only loss is pride and money, which in my prespective can me made again. We don’t need to stop fighting we need to change the way we fight.
It’s because we are a worker-based, anti-British-lords-and-ladies culture, so it’s embarassing for us to be rich. (It shouldn’t be, but there it is.)
For example, we still foster the idea that any man can be President, which is nonsense. Only the upper class can afford to spend millions of their and other people’s money to take a job that pays $400k. To any middle or working class American, that would be insane (and almost impossible).
Yes, we have a half-black President now… who went to Harvard Law. This simply shows that minorities can be privileged, too — nothing more.
“This simply shows that minorities can be privileged, too — nothing more.”
This also shows that bigotry, at bottom, is about wealth rather than other factors.
Barack Obama grew up the son of a single mother on social assistance, including food stamps. He won an academic scholarship to Harvard. Of course minorites can be from privelged backgrounds – but Barack Obama was certainly not from one of them.
“To a rich person, self-made typically means starting with little more than boarding school education, a family fortune of $1 million to $10 million and little or no reliance on maids, butlers and nannies”
– Thank you, this is so friggin true.