Always the CEO, never the janitor

On upward identification, the American imagination, and why we protect people we’ll never be

Last week, Zohran Mamdani stood outside Ken Griffin’s $238 million penthouse at 220 Central Park South — the most expensive apartment ever sold in the United States — and announced a tax on it.

Well, not specifically on that apartment. On all of them. The pied-à-terre tax, as it’s called, would add an annual surcharge on NYC properties worth over $5 million when the owner lives somewhere else. It would affect roughly 13,000 of New York City’s most expensive homes, more than half of which are currently owned by people who don’t actually live here. The projected revenue is $500 million a year.

Of course, here came the reply guys.

Most of these people will never own a $5 million apartment. Most of them will never own a second home. A meaningful percentage of them probably don’t own a first home. And yet there they were, coming to the aid of a class of people who have, historically, not needed much aid.

This isn’t an NYC thing. Roll the tape:

In December, California proposed a one-time 5% tax on net worth over $1 billion — affecting roughly 200 people. Tech Twitter had a meltdown, and there was actually an organized march in San Francisco in defense of billionaires (and it was not satire!).

In April, UK Green leader Zack Polanski floated a 10:1 CEO-to-worker pay ratio and the replies were filled with people arguing it would “destroy aspiration.” Back in 2021, when Biden proposed raising taxes on income over $400,000, you could find people making $60,000 explaining online why this would destroy the middle class.

In October, Billie Eilish stood up at the WSJ Innovator Awards and called out the billionaires in the room to redistribute their wealth — and people were pissed at her!

Of course, not every objection to these policies is bad faith. There are real arguments about capital flight and state revenue. That’s not what I’m writing about today. I’m writing about the other guy.

There is a particular kind of American who, upon hearing that Jeff Bezos took another joyride to the edge of space while his warehouse workers peed in bottles, will squint and say: well, he built that company himself. Maybe they make $54,000 a year. They’ve never met Jeff Bezos. And yet here they are, a volunteer attorney for the defense, arguing his case pro bono in the comments.

So why do we do this?

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The system is fair, and other things I need you to believe

Close your eyes. Picture yourself in twenty years.

I’d bet most of you pictured a version of yourself with more money. Nicer apartment, nicer car. Bigger title. More vacations, more stuff. Maybe a dog.

Almost nobody pictures themselves worse off.

Americans don’t defend billionaires because they think they are billionaires. They defend them because they believe they’re on the way. The belief is remarkably durable — study after study shows Americans dramatically overestimate their odds of moving up the income ladder. Your future self, in your head, is always going up.

The reason this belief is so durable is that the alternative is scary. Believing life outcomes are basically deserved — that the rich earned it, that hard work pays off — means you’re driving the car. You’re the main character. You’re in control.

The alternative is destabilizing: outcomes are at least partly shaped by forces outside your control (where you were born, who your parents were, whether you got sick at the wrong time), and your own situation could change tomorrow through no fault of your own.

Believing the system is fair protects people from the terror of that. If success is mostly luck, then so is failure — and if failure is mostly luck, there’s not much standing between you and a much harder life. So we reach for the version of the story where effort is the only variable, because that’s the version where we’re in charge.

This is why people will rationalize and defend the systems that govern them, even when those systems are working against them, because accepting the alternative is psychologically worse than the cost of the lie.

And this is exactly where upward identification becomes politically useful to the people at the top. If you believe the system is fair, then billionaires are living proof of hard work paying off. A tax on wealth isn’t a tax on them, in this framing — it’s a tax on the future you that you’re building toward.

This is the “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” — a phrase often misattributed to Steinbeck, actually popularized by writer Ronald Wright. American class identity is often conjugated in the future tense. I will have been rich. And the reason that the future self feels so real is that we have almost no accurate picture of where we actually stand.

@nathancjunWhy do the poorest americans care so much about billionaires? #MAGA #Trump #Politics #zohranmamdani #NewYorkCity #NYC #socialism

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Normal is a marketing budget

We are pretty bad at two things: a) conceptualizing how much money a billion dollars actually is and b) understanding just how extreme wealth inequality is in our country.

Statistically speaking, you are more likely to die in a plane crash, win an Olympic gold medal, have conjoined twins, or become president of the United States than you are to become a billionaire.

And nevertheless, we persist!

Part of this is obfuscation, as economic inequality can be difficult to perceive and we’re measurably bad at processing large numbers. But the bigger part is cultural. It’s how the rich show up in our lives.

Aspiration is the dominant mode of American culture, because aspiration drives consumption — and we, famously, love consuming things. From reality TV to Succession and Industry to #RichTok, our media elevates and amplifies wealth narratives to sell us a specific lifestyle. The genre doesn’t matter — glossy, satirical, cautionary, or aspirational — the effect is the same. Wealth is everywhere. Even the shows critiquing the ultra-rich end up publicizing the narrative. All press is good press.

All of this raises our reference points and distorts our sense of what’s normal. The baseline for “rich” drifts steadily upward, because the people we see are disproportionately coming from the top of the distribution.

How we talk about billionaires

Coverage treats billionaires as a category of person (founders, visionaries, disruptors) rather than the result of an economic condition. If billionaires are a type of person, then becoming one is a question of being that type — grit, vision, hustle. But if billionaires are a structural outcome of late-stage capitalism, the relevant question is about the system producing them.

Wealth gets discussed in terms of lifestyle rather than power. We focus on the yachts and the mansions and the $50 million weddings — not the fact that a single individual’s decisions can reshape labor markets, media landscapes, and political outcomes. Wealth becomes an aesthetic to envy instead of a condition to analyze.

Plus, many of today’s ultra-wealthy are parasocially available in a way that previous eras of extreme wealth were not. We feel like we know these people, even though the relationship is entirely one-sided.

This does something to our perception: it collapses the imaginative distance between you and them even as the material distance grows. Because it seems like super rich people are everywhere (on our social feeds, in the news, on billboards) we overestimate both how many there are and how reachable that tier is. Which is why people consistently guess there are vastly more billionaires than actually exist, and dramatically underestimate how much wealth is concentrated at the top.

Who benefits?

So far we’ve been talking about psychology and culture, which are real — but they exist within a structure.

Billionaires own significant shares of American media. They fund the think tanks that produce the policy ideas that shape legislation. They underwrite academic programs, endow chairs, fund the research that gets cited in congressional hearings. The ideas circulating in public life circulate (in part) because someone paid for them to.

The wealthy also participate (read: donate) in politics at dramatically higher rates than everyone else. Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page’s landmark 2014 paper found that when the preferences of wealthy Americans diverge from everyone else’s, it’s the wealthy whose preferences end up reflected in policy.

And a lot of our policy architecture — the machinery that determines who can access and build wealth — is designed to protect ultra-rich wealth and let them keep compounding. This is primarily done through rewarding capital over labor.

Our tax code, corporate structures, trusts, offshore finance, private equity, buybacks — all of it is infrastructure built to move money upward and protect it once it arrives.

Meanwhile, the institutions that used to protect labor interests and produce class consciousness — unions, community organizations, dense neighborhood social life, mass-membership political parties — have been hollowed out. People move more, know their neighbors less, and spend more time in algorithmically sorted online spaces than in shared physical ones. It’s hard to organize when you don’t know where you stand.

CEO Pay Has Grown 90 Times Faster than Typical Worker Pay Since 1978 (source)

The American economy needs its people to hold a specific story about themselves — that they are upwardly mobile, individually responsible, a rung or two from making it — so the economy can keep doing what it’s doing to them.

Which is why the economic anger in this country so reliably goes sideways or down — at the welfare recipient, at immigrants, at the upper middle class making $500K — rather than truly up, at the actual people whose preferences have shaped the tax code for fifty years. The $500K family and the $80K family have vastly more in common structurally with each other than either has with the people holding generational wealth. You would not know this from the way we talk about them.

But even if you could see all of this clearly — why would you still resist redistribution? Why would a person who understands the math vote against policies that would materially help them?

The answer has to do with fear.

Why we hoard

In America, there’s a feeling that no one is coming to save you.

Lose your job, no one is coming. Get sick, the bill is yours. Kid needs childcare, you figure it out. Get old and can’t work, you’d better have saved.

The American safety net is so thin that most people can feel the ground through it. And when the ground feels that close, the response is often to hoard.

This is why redistribution is such a hard sell in the U.S. in a way it isn’t in countries with stronger social systems. In places where healthcare, childcare, higher education, eldercare, and housing are at least partially collective responsibilities, wealth redistribution is a trade: you give up some money, you get real protection against the worst things that can happen to you.

Here, there is no trade, so everyone feels like they have to hoard their own money just to feel safe. And once you’ve spent your whole life grinding to build that private cushion, the idea of sharing it feels like someone’s trying to take your hard-earned security away.

Plus, the fifty years of conservative economic messaging has been converting structural questions into moral ones, so that “should we fund universal healthcare” becomes “why should I have to pay for someone else.” All of this creates individualism at scale.

So you get a self-reinforcing system: weak safety net → people feel like they need to hoard their money → hoarding creates psychological investment in the existing hierarchy → hierarchy gets defended through anti-redistribution politics → safety net stays weak.

So here’s the full shape of it. Upward identification mentally relocates us toward wealth we will never have. Meritocratic ideology recasts defending that wealth as moral rather than self-interested. Media and digital culture normalize extreme wealth as a slightly better version of our own lives. Structural power ensures the ideas that reach us are the ideas that serve the wealthy. Institutional hollowing-out breaks up the networks where we might notice our shared interests. And underneath all of it, the absence of a safety net keeps us scared, private, and clutching.

Most of us are on the labor side of the economy. What we have depends on how much we work. That’s true whether you make $40,000 or $400,000 — you are still someone whose financial security depends on showing up. The ultra-wealthy do not.

I am much closer to becoming homeless than I am to becoming a billionaire. I would reckon that many of you are in the same boat. I think continuously reminding yourself of this fact is an important exercise when expressing discontent with our current economic system.