stories on Affluence

Robert H. Richards and Ethan Couch illustrate how opportunity bends toward affluent white males. Richards was found guilty of raping his three-year-old daughter, but because of his connection to the D...

Talking about affluence and privilege is hard, but it doesn’t have to be. I am continually grateful for the perspectives of people outside my own fold. Like Dr. Martin Luther King, for instance, who t...

I was teaching an English class in a high-rise apartment complex full of low-income families in Minneapolis—mostly immigrant and refugees from East Africa. The tenants’ association paid for me to come...

I had a memorable lunch a few years ago with my friends Mike and Claudia, who had recently returned from Malawi, a small country in southeastern Africa. We were sitting in a booth at one of those chai...

At the airport, Hugh Maclellan Jr. saw an acquaintance who looked troubled. “What’s the matter?” Hugh asked. The man sighed. “I thought I was finally going to have a weekend to myself. But now I have ...

Consider the following summary of an interview conducted by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, two of the world’s leading researchers on poverty: In a village in Indonesia we met Ibu Emptat, the wif...

We are meant to be part of the flow of abundance: to open our hands to receive what we need and share what we have with others. Jesus taught his followers to be radically generous when he said: “Sell ...

Lifelong family friends own more than a thousand acres of land deep in Southern Mississippi, which they refer to as “the estate.” There isn’t a holiday get-together that passes without the family meet...

Financially speaking, the difference between you and Bill Gates is smaller than the difference between you and the average person living outside the U.S. To most people, your bank accounts look virtua...

Truth be told, whether we realize it or not, we all harbor romantic notions of aristocracy. Though we claim equality as a cultural value, there is a part of us that dreams of leisure, luxury, comfort,...

At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, has made more money in a single day than Heller had earned fro...

In the fall of 2009, I was invited to go on a month-long speaking tour throughout Africa. During the trip, a CEO from South Africa named Salim took me to Soweto, a township just outside of Johannesbur...

Material wealth doesn’t make us happy. Listen to some of the wealthiest people of their day: “The care of $200 million is enough to kill anyone. There is no pleasure in it.” W. H. Vanderbilt “I am t...

One Sunday morning, after delivering a sermon, a preacher was asked by a friend how it was received by the congregation. The sermon focused on the Christian responsibility of the wealthy to help the p...

A reporter once asked the ultra-wealthy Oil magnate John Paul Getty if it was true that his estate was worth, at the time, a billion dollars. Getty remained silent for a minute or two. Eventually he r...

Members of the Natomo family sit on the flat roof of their mud house in Mali, Africa, posing for their early morning photograph. Their earthly belongings are arrayed in front of them. Two kettles, pla...

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Therefore, don’t give a man a fish.” This is the cultural mantra of many in the middle and upper ...

William James, in a famous letter to H. G. Wells in 1906, credited what he called American “moral flabbiness” to “the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That—with the squalid cash interpr...

Investor T. Boone Pickens talked about how good it feels to give. He said, “I was put here to make money so I could give it away.” I heard a nearly giddy Warren Buffet, then the second or third riches...

Picture 269 people entering eternity in a plane crash in the Sea of Japan. Before the crash there is a noted politician, a millionaire corporate executive, a playboy and his playmate, a missionary kid...

After striking a large deposit of gold, two miners in the Klondike gold rush were so excited about unearthing more and more gold each day that they neglected to store up provisions for the winter. The...

An emissary from a learned society came to invite the eminent scientist Louie Agassiz to address its members. Agassiz refused on the grounds that lectures of this sort took up too much time that shoul...

In January 1999 I was flying on Saudi Arabian Airlines from Mumbai, India, to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and then onward to London. I arrived at the Mumbai airport to find a long line. Perhaps seventy-five...

There was a rich young man who had a series of disappointments that made him feel that life was not worth while, as if he really had nothing left to live for. On his way to the river where he intended...

When I was in college I sometimes visited Bel Air Presbyterian Church, as did many of my friends. At that time Bel Air was known for being a place celebrities liked to visit. (This was not my favorite...

There’s undeniably a dark side to restless ambition, however. You can see it in dramatic fashion in the documentary  Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop , which follows the comedian on tour after he left the To...

Read any study on human satisfaction and you will see the paramount role of relationships with others. And yet, so many of us readily exchange friendship and community for success and achievement, onl...

In a July 2014 New York Times article about happiness, author Arthur C. Brooks quotes tenth-century Moorish king Abd Al-Rahman III, who assumed his throne as a young man and enjoyed tangible abundance...

The ways that social structures and institutions systematically work against the interest of people of color is called institutional racism. Institutional racism and historic racism are not unrelated ...

The world has always despised people from the wrong places and with the wrong credentials. We are always trying to justify ourselves. We need desperately to feel superior to others. And everything abo...