I have been cultivating my intellect so long that I had to adapt my hunting strategy to the new lay of the land, to aim low and shoot ideas at my feet instead of bagging them on the fly. The other day, I was on the chase, dodging tree stumps in my head, making mental notes to get out the tractor and chains for that ugly one on the back forty, jotting down landmarks with one eye while tracking squirrels with the other -- all this in the heart of Beyoğlu -- when a black beast jumped out of the woods and nearly mauled me. A Mercedes-Benz sports car, low, sleek, fast… zoom! I just had time to save my knee and see the driver zip by, cell phone in hand, a blond punk oblivious to the heart that had just skipped a beat in her honor.
Only the absence of my shotgun freed me to wonder what a 19-year-old girl was doing driving a 100,000 euro car. To do the poor little rich girl justice, teens being teens the world over, she might just as well have been driving a used Volkswagen and scared me all the same. I'd have had better chances of recovering medical costs and damages from the insurer of a Mercedes, who knows but that the driver of a rust-bucket might have no insurance at all, but still, I resented my near scrape more coming from the hands of a spoiled brat.
The question is: Do rich people care less about the consequences of their behavior than ordinary civilians? We know that corporate managers take greater care with their decisions when it's their money on the line. But then, I've almost been run over by any number of taxis, and the drivers certainly are not among the masters of the universe.
Teachers in İstanbul have often told me how much more fun it is to teach poor kids, how rich kids at private schools and universities don't give a damn. Just yesterday a lady told me that when she first came here she commuted between two schools, one an academy in a posh neighborhood, the other a small “dershane” in the concrete jungle of Bağcılar. She said the rich parents had sent their kids to get them out of the house, or at least the students acted that way, but that the poorer students really wanted to be in class, really wanted to learn.
I suppose that I would have developed a sense of entitlement if my parents had given me a Mercedes-Benz when I was in school, a sense that I deserved the best even if I didn't exactly earn it. And what student wouldn't feel superior knowing his car is worth three years of his teacher's salary?
Now I am attending the annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, meetings that bring together all kinds of people, most of them richer than your average schmuck on the street. But when you get into international finance and policy wonkdom, there's rich and there's rich. An economist on salary is living the good life, but not on the same rarefied level as the finance minister, who in turn is not in the same league as the investment banker with millions in salary and bonuses.
Do the richest people in the convention center care most about the global economy? Or do they care least, because they can afford to ride out the bad times no matter how long the slump?
My son told me that his homework this week in sociology class was to find out whether firefighters are born courageous, or whether they learn to be brave. I said that the assignment sounded more like behavioral science than sociology, that maybe his teacher wants to be a psychologist for individuals rather than a student of the group. Squirrels, squirrels, everywhere.
