What “good” does a skyline do for society? The enormous costs to build super talls would go much further in myriad other ways, even just by making a few tall or many regular size buildings. Very far from progress if you as me.
Actually, I would take the construction of a novel building just to give views and prestige to less than one hundred families to be evidence of societal regression, since it can be used as a proxy for extreme wealth inequality.
Note that these supertalls only exist in the first place because it's artificially difficult to build regular-sized buildings in Manhattan. It's very unlikely anybody would have bothered building anything in this specific form if not for the onerous zoning codes the developers were skirting when they designed them.
More info: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-11/gaming-ne...
This is just consumption for consumption's sake. You shouldn't throw away a building in ten or twenty years just beecause you get tired of it!
Humans have to get over the obsessive consumption if we are to survive the twenty first century.
Maybe it's time to embrace the future and replace these with arcologies.
> making clear that even multimillion-dollar price tags do not guarantee problem-free living
this reiterates that you can make a living simply catering to wealthy people's problems instead of dismissing them
pick and choose your battles
You can make a living polluting the environment.
You can make a living defending corruption, helping the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer.
The problems of the wealthy are as the problems of a tick sucking the lifeblood from a host. Rest assured that extending them empathy and compassion will be a strictly one-sided arrangement when push comes to shove.
There seems to be growing resentment of "the rich" recently, but I believe that's misplaced. Things will get worse for "the poor" until the cause is diagnosed correctly.
Anecdotally my experience aligns with the findings in the studies - my richer friends seem far less likely to tip well or give money to a panhandler than my poorer friends who tend to be more inclined to share the wealth, when they have it.
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wealth-reduce...
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01973533.2018.14...
The top richest Americans have sucked out all the extra value created in society for the last two generations, while offloading a great deal of risk onto individuals, who are the least likely to be able to bear it.
Overall, we are in the process of destroying our ecosystem, and again, the richest people on the planet consume and waste literally _orders of magnitude_ more than the poorest.
You having met some rich people who are also nice is just an anecdote.
You mentioned planet ecosystem and consumption, so let's use energy as an example. The richest people consume much more per capita than everyone else, but still represent a tiny fraction of overall usage. So no matter how you deal with the rich, it won't solve that problem. Meanwhile, everyone acts in their own self-interest, so you have developing nations increasing their per capita energy consumption as their standard of living increases, and overall energy use goes up. The planet doesn't know the difference in who used to energy and whether it was justified/deserving/whatever. The result is the same.
So what's the solution? You could decrease wasteful consumption (commuting, global shipping as labor arbitrage) and you can change how energy is generated (i.e. renewables), which you could lump into political and technological changes. The easiest way to do either is to align people's incentives so they'll naturally drive those changes, since again people act in their own self-interest. Some rich people will lose out in that transition and try to oppose changes, others will benefit and try to further them, but the net effect isn't necessarily negative. And of course energy use is just one example here.
So these problems are kind of orthogonal to how you feel about rich people, meaning that if you let yourself get distracted with that, you'll have little impact.
However, when we see bad behavior from the rich, like the Koch brothers, their wealth amplifies the bad behavior and it seems to have an outsized effect upon the world.
Any numbers to support this? Or you just believe so?
Maybe not Gates, but Steve Ballmer. Larry fricken' Ellison. Terry and TC Gou. Koch Brothers. Musk & Bezos. The list goes on and on.
I would also like to point out that everyone's anecdotes about "their wealthy friends not tipping or dropping change to beggars" are not the same people you are thinking about.
Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey,
And these have smaller yet to bite 'em,
And so proceed ad infinitum
Because we are going to eat the rich, right?