Everybody just wants freedom
What I keep saying. People pretend to be concerned about global warming but they go right on taking cruises and trips involving air travel and buying SUVs and gigantic yachts.
… the superyacht industry is booming – and the number of vessels under construction or on order worldwide has hit a new record. According to figures revealed in the latest edition of Boat International’s Global Order Book, more than 1,200 superyachts are slated to be built – a rise of 25% on last year.
That’s ok. The people who are struggling to stay alive 50 years from now will have every sympathy with contemporary people who just need a little recreation.
“The market’s never been busier,” said Will Christie, a superyacht broker.
…
“Everybody just wants freedom, and ultra-high-net-worth individuals can afford it,” he added. “The ability to escape anywhere is very attractive in the current climate. They think: I don’t need to be stuck in the office, and if you’re worth billions, why should you be?”
Why indeed? They’ll be dead before the planet fries completely, so why should they give up anything?
Critics of the boom in superyachts point to the vastly disproportionate environmental damage produced by the super-rich. “Whether it’s this or private jets or trips to space, they’re just sticking two fingers up at the rest of society,” said Peter Newell, a professor of international relations at Sussex University. “It’s decadent. They’re not comfortable with the constraints that come with accepting collective responsibility for the fate of the planet.”
Being rich does that to people. They think it makes them superior, and thus entitled to say “fuck the rest of society.”
The economic anthropologist Richard Wilk, a distinguished professor at Indiana University in the US, said: “Of course, if you add every superyacht together, it’s just a blip on total greenhouse gas production. But it is symbolic – and the global impact of the 2,000-odd billionaires on the planet are very significant. So it’s part of a pattern of overconsumption by the upper crust.”
In research with his colleague Beatriz Barros, he found that the average billionaire had a carbon footprint thousands of times that of the average person. The global average footprint of CO2 emitted per person is just under five tonnes, while they estimated that Roman Abramovich – the top polluter according to their list – was responsible for about 33,859 tonnes of carbon emitted in 2018. More than two-thirds of that was the product of his yacht, the 162.5-metre Eclipse.
Well he’s six or seven many many many times more important and special than we 5-tonners are.
One question that comes to my mind is why should you be worth billions? What makes you so much more special than people who are worth merely thousands (if that)? What is it that you produce for society, that you do to make society better, that is so very much more valuable than fire fighting or teaching or nursing or sweeping floors or cleaning bathrooms or building homes? Or any of the other myriad of things people do that actually add something.
Most rich people these days apparently just move money around. Yeah, yeah, I know, investment, etc, growing the economy. Sure, buying a superyacht will grow the economy, but how much does it grow the economy to stick millions or billions of dollars in a Swiss bank so you can avoid paying taxes? Compared to how much it grows the economy to buy basic needs like food, clothing, and toilet paper?
Money suckers everyone. Don’t have much use for ’em myself. And what little respect I might have once had (not much, if any) has dissipated in the blatant greed and dishonesty displayed by the super rich, not to mention the blatant disregard for anyone other than themselves.
I saw a video once upon a time about an experiment with playing a Monopoly game. Iirc, it showed that people who were “rich” players started to act all entitled; they were more likely to treat other players badly, and more likely to cheat.
To expand on iknklast’s point, we often hear about how special rich people are. how they grow the economy. How they should be given a special pass for their personal spending or peccadillos because of that. Even how we couldn’t get by without them.
To a very limited extent there is some truth in the idea that concentrating economic power in one individuals hands allows magical stuff to happen. We could go through history and identify examples (good and bad) of huge technological and social leaps triggered by such a concentration of power in the hands of someone with a vision. But…
Beyond that limited point, I’d argue that on balance the harm done is greater than the good. Firstly, most mega rich people don’t make lasting or even any magic happen. They just get rich. What exactly has Abramovich done? Jeff Bezos? Bezos is actually an excellent example. Amazon hasn’t grown the economy. If anything it’s shrunk it. Yes, it has aggregated shopping into one very visible and very useful place and demonstrated the power of online shopping. But at root Amazon is a logistics company. All that shopping was going to occur anyway, either in online stores or bricks and mortar shops. With the vast concentration of shopping through one portal the logistics become amenable to optimisation that is impossible when the same volume of shopping is spread over hundreds of thousands of smaller operations. The economic gains from that efficiency are what has enabled Bezos to accumulate his incredible wealth. It has also come, not just at the expense of other retailers and logistics firms, but at the expense of people employed directly and indirectly by those firms. Fewer retails staffs ewer cleaners and building maintenance contractors, fewer people in payroll and HR administration. Fewer people in marketing and advertising, fewer people in stores, packaging and shipping.
The other rich are much the same. By and large they make money via control of a scarce resource, or by optimisation of current economic activity. it’s sometimes quite impressive, even useful, but it’s visibility doesn’t mean it’s actually made people better off in aggregate.
But, but, but, here’s Australia’s very special billionaire wanting to “raise the standard of living”.
You poor plebs just don’t know how hard it is for a woman to make her way in the world of male-dominated superyachts.
A couple of things about that Roj. Have you got any idea why the writer misgendered Rinehart for the first half of the article, and then Palaszczuk at the end? It seemed weird.
Secondly, if you can afford to own and run a super yacht, you can fucking well afford to pay commercial fees for the provision of services to them. Superyacht owners should club together and build specialist marinas where they want them, or if they think they’re a sure fire commercial winner, just go it alone, or find a company to do it for them. Expecting the government to fund it for you is just plain socialism. Who would have thought that Gina fucking Rinehart was a socialist!
They won’t though. For a start they are so self-entitled that they expect others to lay on infrastructure to suit them at massively subsidised cost because of the ‘good’ they do the economy. Secondly, super yacht owners are fickle, constantly searching for he new, the fashionable, the ever more exclusive. Today’s must do destination, or must have yacht feature, is tomorrow’s passé.
Re #2, not exactly the same thing, but there is a board game (I have a set at home) called Anti Monopoly, in which there are two kinds of players, monopolists and competitors, and they literally play by different rules.
That sounds interesting.
Another way to play Monopoly is to have one person sit out the first 6 times around the board, join in on the 7th and see how hard it is to win from there. That is how life works for the 99%.
Also a good metaphor for ex-slaves and their descendants in the US.
I think that be sitting out the first 14 rounds.
iknklast:
That. See how the ‘superyacht broker’ casually speaks of being a billionaire as though it’s something that just happens to people, something they can’t help being? And of course, if you’re a billionaire, it’s unthinkable that if you’d like a bit of freedom you might rent an old fishing boat or something.