So now Forbes has added a “self-made” rating to each of the members in its richest 400 Americans list, which is supposed to describe if the person made it on their own, instead of making it through privilege. This rating is used by Forbes to claim that 69% of the 400 made their fortunes on their own.
This might be an effort to convince us middle-class Americans that the wealthy are deserving, even when they take our piece of the pie in addition to taking their own piece. (Great wealth is available to everyone! You’re just not doing it right! The system is fair!)
And this rating is probably somewhat in response to Thomas Piketty’s book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, which essentially proves that wealth feeds on itself, produces more wealth, and becomes entrenched (What? Trickle down doesn’t work? It takes money to make money?).
I don’t know if Forbes is being truthful and unbiased when they state that 69% of the 400 created their own fortunes. I have my doubts. For example, they claim that ratings 6 through 10 (out of 1-10), are for those who “truly made it on their own”, yet ratings 6 and 7 had significant financial help, in some manner, from the wealthy. And this is just the tip of the iceberg, there can be all sorts of low-awareness, biased interpretations, or downright deception, used to get that 69%.
Regardless, I think that Forbes should add additional ratings that would help describe how some of the 400 made their money and got on the list. How about:
A rating for paying their employees poverty or low-standard-of-living wages.
A rating for outsourcing their employee’s jobs to China.
A rating for not cleaning up poison generation from their oil or industrial production.
A rating for foreclosing and throwing people out of their homes.
A rating for financial hustles like leveraged buyouts, liquidations, etc.
A rating for taxpayer subsidies such as bailouts, tax breaks, employee public assistance, etc.
A rating for predatory financial traps and tricks.
All of these can help build great wealth and help explain how some of them got on the list. And it only takes a high rating in one of these categories.
