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Quote of the Day: Rich Men and Poor Men
I never got a job from a poor man.
-Phil Gramm
You know what else you never got from a poor man (except as the intermediary of a salesman)? The ability to place long-distance phone calls, the personal automobile, commercial air travel, commercial jet air travel, mobile phones, electricity at home, television, and maybe — in the future — the ability to travel in space. All of those, except the last, started out as things unavailable, except to the unimaginably wealthy. Today we consider most of these everyday necessities — except for air travel, which is not everyday.
The oldest among us remember when “Jet Set” was the term for a person living in luxury (with the SST being the cream). Now jet travel has become this century’s bus line, a necessary evil to get quickly from place to place. Those with memories of the 199os remember a time when only the rich had a mobile phone. And those of us old enough to remember the Jet Set may remember the old codgers of their youth talking about a time when only the rich had automobiles.
With technology, the pattern is inexorable (unless the government interferes). First, it is affordable only to the super-rich, who largely pay the development costs to attain some good or service no one else has. Next, the cost drops, and it gets adopted by the rich. Soon, as manufacturing experience and efficiencies of scale reduce costs, it moves to the wealthy, the upper-middle-class, and the working class. Finally, it is adopted by the poor. It becomes a commodity.
Eventually, the only difference income makes in accessing the once-exclusive product and service is how fancy the thing is and how often it is used. The super-rich own luxury private jets they use almost daily. The poor fly economy class and may fly only a few times in a lifetime.
So what brings this to mind? A screed on a conservative news site grumping about how spacewalks are the province of the super-rich. For those unaware, tech magnate Jared Isaacman underwrote the cost of a manned space flight, Polaris Dawn, choosing to be owner-aboard during the flight. It launched September 10, 2024, carrying four people — two men and two women — into orbit.
It achieved several notable firsts, among which is the first-ever manned spaceflight in a polar orbit — with a near-90-degree inclination. It also has the highest altitude of any manned spaceflight since the Apollo lunar missions. In addition, it is the first commercial spaceflight to have a spacewalk, where the crew exits the spacecraft and travels with nothing but a spacesuit between them and vacuum. This is the first time space travelers not working for a government have done this.
From my view, these four are living a dream I have had since childhood. I wanted to travel in space. The main difference between Isaacman and me is he has the money to live that dream — to which I say, good for him. Not so others. In the article I linked, the author analogized Isaacman to John Jacob Astor, who died aboard the Titanic. He grumped about how space now seems accessible only to the super-rich, and decrying the money Isaacman spent on this. He implies space travel and space exploration should be left to the proper people — governments.
Isaacman is following a long tradition of privately funded expeditions of exploration. In the nineteenth century, wealthy men sponsored expeditions to explore Africa, the Arctic, and the Antarctic. Teddy Roosevelt (not John Jacob Astor-wealthy, but by no means poor) personally participated in an exploration of the Amazon basin. The idea of government-only spaceflight 60+ years after the Space Age started is confining. Private enterprise is what has supercharged spaceflight in the 21st century.
Moreover, where Isaacman is going today, others will follow in the future. I may never get to travel in space, but my grandchildren, if they want to, may have that chance. Just like my grandfathers never flew in an airplane, but I have.
It is also Isaacman’s money. He earned it. If this is how he wants to spend it, great. He is pushing the frontiers with his money. Would it be better for him to be spending it on cocaine and hot babes? And if Elon Musk gets to use that money to improve his manned spacecraft and lower their costs? That is a win-win.
Let’s have three old-fashioned cheers for gentlemen adventurers. Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip…
Published in Group Writing
Envy rears its ugly head in so many unexpected ways and from unexpected sources. [I have been on both sides of toxic envy.]
It was a little harsh, hearing it as a young person in my twenties, when Rush would brag about some new tech he’d bought and then justify it with your post. That is, the rich are early adopters and pave the way for everyone getting it. Of course he was right.
Thanks for the details on this mission. I didn’t realize the extent that it was privately funded. I love the technical challenges this mission tackled and what it could mean for regular people.
I must have been weird, because that never bothered me when I was young. I figured the rich idiots would shake all the bugs out of it so by the time I got it, I had not bought into dead-end tech, and it was reliable and cheap.
I am rich now, and I am still into cheap.
It was probably more of Rush’s overall braggadocio. It took me a bit to warm up to that being all part of his jovial nature. It also didn’t take too long for me to realize that you want to wait until the bugs are flushed out when something comes out.
I figured out it was all schitck almost immediately. If you had never heard the Parable of the Talents it was easy to dismiss his bit about “talent on loan from God’ as boasting. But I always thought it had a deeper meaning. We all have talent on loan from God and will have to account for what we did with it at the Last Judgement. I always felt that was Rush’s daily acknowledgement of that debt.
‘Greed may not be good, but envy is evil’
–Michael Gibson (1517 Fund_
Terrific post, Seawriter!
Some people have to find something to complain about, even if nobody is harmed.
I vaguely recall a story from several years ago in which an extremely wealthy man spent his fortune researching treatment for a disease. The disease affected a relatively small number of people, so it was not financially plausible for the standard medical companies to work on it. But the daughter of the extremely wealthy man had the disease. The research was successful. Which benefited not only the daughter, but some number of other people who had that disease.
There are just so many technologies to which the progression is visible.
Before the motorcar, there was the horse-drawn carriage. Until the middle to late 19th Century exclusively the province of the extremely wealthy or government officials. By the middle to late 19th Century available to modestly wealthy doctors and business people. And in urban areas, hansom cabs made some of the benefits available to less-wealthy people.
Before she died in 1972, my maternal grandmother had traveled several times across the USA in airplanes larger than the house in which she was born (she was born before the first flight by the Wright Brothers). My paternal grandmother (also born before the Wright Brothers’ flight) had flown across oceans in large jetliners.
My maternal grandparents (my grandfather was a modest mid-level manager), who had both been born before automobiles ever graced the roads of their hometowns, had by the middle of their lives been able to afford a steady stream of new automobiles for their enjoyment.
I’m currently looking out several of the two dozen double-pane glass windows in my modest house. There was a time when having glass paned windows in a house was the exclusive province of the super-wealthy. The house mechanical air conditioning system is holding the interior temperature at 76 degrees F, despite an outside temperature of 91 degrees F. Less than a century ago such home climate control was the dream of the super-wealthy, and even they might not have been able to get it.
Even before the cellular telephone, the landline telephone, was, in the early 20th Century the exclusive tool of government and the extremely wealthy. By the middle of the 20th Century the telephone was everywhere.
I am not in a particular rush to get to space. And I’m not sure about my children (especially my son). But my grandson (now 7) might be interested.
To add the the above lists, how many automotive features that were once available only on the top luxury cars are now standard on all cars?
If we say no space tourism for rich people, that means no space tourism for anybody, ever.
I love A/C. I don’t care for power windows.
I regret the passage of the crank window on automobiles. I am an old curmudgeon, though.
I was on summer break between 6th and 7th grades when I and my family watched the first moon landing.
I grew up thinking I had a real chance at making a trip to space, maybe even working on a large space station, without having to go through an elite astronaut program.
One of my disappointments.
When I was in college (’73-’79) I was asked where I saw myself in 20 years. My answer was as a project manager designing an orbital space platform. (Manned, of course.) The board I was sitting before was impressed with my forward thinking, because at that time they honestly thought there would be enough manned orbital platforms in space by the 1990s that an engineer with 20-years experience could be project manager for one – rather like offshore oil platforms.
Hear, hear.
I’m thank God this isn’t a positive book review about space x book.
It’s hard to get rich buying books that you recommend.
Oh wait. Books are exactly the sort of thing that used to be the province of the rich.
Wait a few weeks.
True that. Although because price has dropped so much you can actually get rich writing books. Maybe not J. K. Rowling rich, but if you define rich as being able to afford the lifestyle you wish to live without having to work, then Seawriter rich.
Hmm, maybe there’s a market for aftermarket manual window crank kits.
Hmm, I don’t think I’ve ever lived in, or known anyone who lived in, a house – “modest” or otherwise – with two dozen windows.
Sounds more like “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.”
My current 4,500 sq ft home, which I got relatively cheap because it’s in a small town and had been used for office/commercial space in the past, has 11.
The 5-bedroom house where the family lived in Oregon for many years, had 12.
Hooray!
I had a 1993 luxury sedan (Infiniti Q45) that did not have remote door locks. By the time I bought a 2001 Dodge minivan (less than ten years and about as pedestrian an automobile as one can imagine) remote door locks were universal.
Once the stuff is cheap/easy/common enough, it’s just one more thing they can add that costs them $10 but they can add $200 to the price. (Even if it’s not listed as “optional.”)
In the computer world, one equivalent would be “Windows modems.”
Oops. Should have said “one dozen” for our current house.
But our previous house (much larger, a bit over 3000 sq ft, 3 stories, but still a middle-class suburban house that we sold in 2018 for $250,000) did have two dozen windows. I am aware of the windows because I have always been the window washer and wash at least the outside at least twice a year.
We are attracted to houses with lots of windows. One of the attractions of the current house was that the entire back wall of the house is windows.
The most frustrating house we ever lived in was a 1975 construction house that was about 2100 sq ft on two levels, but had only a few windows (1975 construction standards minimized windows, which at the time were still single-pane, for energy conservation).
I’m thinking a “wall of windows” might best count as a single window. Unless divided into sections perhaps with some significant division in between. For where there are weight-bearing wall studs supporting the roof, etc.
When I counted up windows at the Oregon house, the front living room window counted as “one” although it had a large fixed center part and two “sliders” at the ends/sides. I call that one window, not three. Also, all but one of the windows at my current place has a fixed portion and a sliding portion; but they’re each one window, not two.
I mentioned this discussion to Mrs. Tabby as we ate dinner this evening, and she pointed out that indoor plumbing was once a “show off” item for the super-rich.
I think one can rig up something with a cordless drill.
There used to be kits, probably from JC Whitney among others, to motorize the manual windows. Going the other way would probably be significantly more difficult.
Pretty much everything was.
Rosevelt’s expedition to chart the rio Duvida almost killed him, and left him something of an invalid for the rest of his life. He gashed his leg on a rock and it got infected. This was in the pre antibiotic era. The wound required repeated debridement. Part of the reason he survived was that the expedition was headed by a Brazilian Military officer, Marshall Rondon, a Caboclo (half native) who had extensive experience leading mapping expeditions in the interior of Brazil. The other reason was that his son, Kermit, who accompanied Teddy on the expedition, told his father, knowing that Teddy was contemplating using the cyanide capsule that he always carried, that he would not leave his father ‘s body in the Amazon, and that it would be much easier getting him out alive than dead.
And in 1924, Calvin Coolidge’s son died from an infection he got due to a blister from playing tennis on the White House grounds.
The problem with the referenced Hot Air piece by Jazz Shaw is not just the unmistakable stench of Envy, but Ignorance. Specifically, ignorance of economics. Behold this doozy of a statement from the piece:
“The people involved are paying princely sums for the privilege of risking everything … and sucking vast amounts of capital out of the system while doing so.”
How do people get to graduate from college and achieve a reasonable degree of professional success in life in a highly evolved market economy while thinking that there’s some sort of Pot O’ Capital that’s just been depleted to the tune of whatever the Polaris space expedition cost?
Good grief.