| THE other day at a Los Angeles race track, a comedian named Eddie Griffin took a meeting with a concrete barrier and left a borrowed bright-red $1.5 million Ferrari Enzo looking like bad origami. Just to be clear, this was a different bright-red $1.5 million Ferrari Enzo from the one a Swedish businessman crumpled up and threw away last year on the Pacific Coast Highway. |
| So what exactly constitutes a bad day in this rarefied little world? Did the casino owner Steve Wynn cross the mark when he put his elbow through a Picasso he was about to sell for $139 million? Did Mel (“I Own Malibu”) Gibson sense bad-day emanations when he started on a bigoted tirade while seated drunk in the back of a sheriff’s car? And if dumb stuff like this comes so easy to these people, how is it that they’re the ones with all the money? |
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As this op-ed in The New York Times goes on to conclude, the rich and famous become “disinhibited”. Scientists at the Univ. of California at Berkeley have conducted experiments that suggest that with power, people tend to forget social norms (“the rules don’t apply to me”) and live a rather large and reckless life, while the lack of power tends to make people play it safe. In other words, the powerless become less inhibited and more frightful of consequences of their actions while the powerful becomes less so.
But what if, one day, I do get my millions and become one of the powerful? The article has advice for that too – I’ll just hire one of the powerless!
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