What an unfortunate event to befall a family of who acquired such wealth by honest means:
In an 1907 essay Mark Twain portrayed Clark as the very embodiment of Gilded Age excess and corruption:
He is as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag; he is a shame to the American nation, and no one has helped to send him to the Senate who did not know that his proper place was the penitentiary, with a ball and chain on his legs. To my mind he is the most disgusting creature that the republic has produced since Tweed's time.[5]
Not sure if you actually read the book, but it outlines the spirit of the times Clark lived in very well and makes the argument that Clark never stooped to the tactics of the so-called robber barons. He paid his employees well and gave back to communities. He was known as honest and fair to those who dealt with him.
His political failings could be traced back to a socially awkward nature. Politics was messy business back then and it was impossible win a race completely honestly. Nothing he did back then was any worse than what everyone else did.
It even examined Clark's history with Twain and Twain's own relationships with Clark's business rivals. That particular rant was very likely politically motivated.
That's a very interesting philosophical question, how to judge historical figures accurately in terms of morality/ethics. My own position on the matter is that standards tend to evolve over time, so when seeking to evaluate someone, you need to take that into account.
If you just go by the Golden Rule standard of ethics, W. A. Clark was far more worthy than many of his rivals of his success. Politics, by its very nature, introduces a great number of potential moral pitfalls and there aren't always good and effective approaches to evading them.
not that complex. your approach to the problems is wrong.
you start with the assumption that current politics belongs to the moral group, when it may very well be outside. so by that bad definition you think it is a complex problem.
they got by with the times. got great fortune, brought great misery. like any other "great name". so maybe the concept of great name always having to befit an hero is what is wrong. humans must abandon the hero myth and the desires for immeasurable riches to be able to stand ground on the moral field.
or you could keep the original paradigm and keep debating how to fit your data in the groups forever.
This sounds very similar to famous socialite Brooke Astor who died a few years ago at 105 in New York with a $198 million estate. There were all sorts of charges of elder abuse and stealing from her, and claims that she was forced to live in squalor. Her son and his attorney ended up serving jail time for grand larceny and forgery.
She was married to the great-great grandson of super-rich John Jacob Astor. I find this to be an interesting example of how long wealth can persist in the US, and a counterexample to the "three generations shirtsleeves-to-shirtsleeves" theory. (As a random aside, her husband's enormously wealthy father died on the Titanic after being denied a lifeboat spot. I find it hard to imagine this happening to the rich and famous today.)
> (As a random aside, her husband's enormously wealthy father died on the Titanic after being denied a lifeboat spot. I find it hard to imagine this happening to the rich and famous today.)
Well, with vastly improved safety regimes in effect across the board, it's difficult to find comparable situations. But you surely won't find third class passenger locked below deck while the upper crust is sauntering into the lifeboats.
The super rich probably doesn't travel on the same vessels as the riff raff at all, but I'm not sure private jets are actually safer than commercial airlines.
I'm mystified by the pro-aristocracy tone of the article:
> There are some happy parts of the book. Clark uses her fabulous wealth to indulge a taste for the world’s best dollhouses and model Japanese castles, built by craftsmen in Germany and Japan. She pays an assistant to write down transcripts of Flintstone episodes. When she wants to make a little music, she takes a Stradivarius violin out of the closet (first she needs to choose which of her Stradivariuses to play).
Yes, it's horrible that these people took advantage of her, but I find it very difficult to get that worked up over it. On the balance, she still won the cosmic lottery, inheriting a tremendous fortune she did nothing to earn, and getting to spend it on trivialities like dollhouses. Rich heiresses attract scumbags for precisely the reasons suggested in the book (they are easy to deceive), and in a way such activity is just the natural downside of inheriting a large fortune in the first place. Without justifying the behavior of any of the people involved, I can't help but feel my feelings of pity are better directed elsewhere.
Yes, it's horrible that these people took advantage of her, but I find it very difficult to get that worked up over it.
I'll be outraged for you. My family is very good about caring for our elderly. The predation is real. The woman in this article could easily have been my grandparents.
People over 70 start to lose their skepticism and can become easy prey for cons, high pressure sales, and other grifters. Just subscribe to your state's attorney general's newsletters to see how rampant this is.
Yes, she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth. But if this article is accurate, Huguette Clark was held as a virtual prisoner by Beth Israel Hospital, and was exploited many others. That just makes me sad.
Gross wealth inequity is a terrible societal problem. Fixing the tax codes is the solution, not stealing from little old ladies.
I never said two wrongs made a right, nor did I say anything about wealth inequality. Indeed, I went to great lengths to avoid making any "right" and "wrong" judgments at all, simply because I find those awfully boring.
My problem was with the tone of the article. Why feel bad for someone who suffers a natural consequence of inherited wealth?
>Why feel bad for someone who suffers a natural consequence of inherited wealth?
Same reason you'd feel bad for anyone? "Natural consequence" doesn't really mean much. Why feel bad for someone that suffers a natural consequence of inherited genes?
Do you feel bad for everyone that something bad happens to?
> Why feel bad for someone that suffers a natural consequence of inherited genes?
You feel bad for them because usually these people are dealt a bad hand in the cosmic game of cards. But this woman was dealt an unimaginably good hand, and then some bad things happened to her that tend to be correlated with the benefits of that fortune. But on the karmic balance, she still made out like a bandit.
Followup: I hear you. I disagree. I've appreciated many of your other comments. So you and me are cool.
I would only ask that you consider that we're all stuck on this rock, with no instruction manual, and no way off, just trying to get through each day the best we can. I have one of those crazy cousins that brought all the badness down on himself. But none of us like seeing him suffer or exploited. Because he really didn't know any better.
Do you live in the U.S.? If so, it's likely that any property that you or you employer own was also taken from the Indians at some point. Maybe your ancestors even lived off slave labor. Are you offering to give back your own ill-gotten wealth?
I live in Canada, and yes, I advocate for land/property/claims of genocide and other disputes between civilized nations to be put before a court of competent jurisdiction such as the ICC so that they may be resolved in accordance with international law.
I would be more than happy to return any property judged by such a court to be ill-gotten to any rightful recipients of it.
Sure, nobody deserves to be taken advantage of, rich or poor. But being taken advantage of is a fact of life. It's pervasive in nature. Moreover, it comes with the territory of inheriting wealth.
It seems odd to me to feel bad for someone who had this problem only because she inherited a bunch of wealth she didn't earn. That's not a question of what she "deserves" but rather who "deserves" our sympathies.
Hello? Beth Israel is a non-profit teaching hospital in New York City that is over 100 years old. that they might have a role in bilking an elderly patient is shocking, plain and simple. (I've been there as a patient myself.)
not to mention exposing the corruption of attorneys, doctors, and various caregivers - people who are supposed to, by virtue of their professions, put the client or patient's interest first.
would this have been a scandal if it were for someone's entire life savings at $100,000? $1,000,000?
at what point on the financial scale does someone become worthy of taking advantage of? some arbitrary metric, where a person is deemed to have "earned" their wealth?
i'm sure this type of thing happens on a smaller scale. we don't hear about it because there aren't enough juicy details to make a 300+ page book. if we're going to talk about who "deserves" our sympathies - imagine it was a family member, then answer accordingly.
> at what point on the financial scale does someone become worthy of taking advantage of?
You're missing my point. You're focusing on whether the actions of the caregivers are justified instead of focusing on our reaction to what happened. People do bad things all the time, surely you don't feel outraged every time it happens.
So why feel particularly sympathetic for someone who inherited a tremendous fortune, then didn't do anything to protect it, despite having every opportunity to do so? I can say "who cares?" without justifying the actions of anyone involved.
I think the GP's point here is that we rely on/trust certain institutions to not take advantage of anybody, no matter whether they "deserve it" or not. When they do, it shakes the trust we have in them that they won't take advantage of us. This isn't a story about an old aristocrat; it's a story of a bunch of institutions that were more corrupt than we thought.
Redistributing wealth from a rich, out of touch heiress might count as a superior allocation of capital if it were taxed and used to fund construction projects or given to responsible charities, but when it is redistributed to opportunistic parasites who preyed on her cluelessness and possible senility, I have trouble believing the world is better off as a result.
I'd agree except for the part where she wasn't getting the care she deserved, and she clearly spent a large part of her old age alone without friends. You can't blame the second part on wealth but at least the care home should honour their contract. That was mostly what got me in this article.
The author is Philip Greenspun. His outlook on life is really dark.
He made some money in the 90's and since then seems to have spent a lot of time thinking about the problems of the rich. I once saw a talk he gave at Google, the upshot of which was that once you're rich there's almost nothing worth doing.
"Yes, it's horrible that these people took advantage of her, but I find it very difficult to get that worked up over it."
E-gads. That had to have been a mistake.
You are not supposed to get worked up over it, any more than you would get worked up over a poor person getting taken advantage of.
It's a bad thing. We observe it and learn from it. We treat everybody equally regardless of whether they "won the cosmic lottery" or not. Getting worked up should be the furthest thing from your mind.
Now perhaps you find it all boring. Fair enough. But to be proud of your own callousness towards others? Not a good thing to be advertising.
I think the point is that this can (and does) happen to anyone, but we never hear about it because they aren't rich. Sometimes it takes particularly egregious violations to call our attention to a broader class of wrongs - like the recent spate of cops raping people during routine traffic stops, or arresting a guy for trespassing at his workplace 63 times in the span of a few years.
The book being reviewed here is one I've been meaning to pickup and read for a while, just been lazy about it. Huguette Clark was literally a living fossil - possibly the very very last holdover from the gilded age, really a very sad story. Though by all accounts - she was happy largely - so maybe not so sad in absolute terms over all.
Although the doctors and nurses were taking care of this woman as best they could, their ultimate goals were purely monetary based on her large wealth.
Yes, truly despicable, personally I forgo a paycheque for the honour of working for the wealthy for free.
These doctors and nurses have some gall as members of the working class to consider acting like those they serve. Who do they think they are? Millionaires?
There is a vast gulf that exists between working for free and blatantly defrauding your patients. Most of humanity lives within that gulf. From your tone, I suspect you may not.
From the sounds of the article everything they did was legal...
Just as her father buying his senate seat was... Just as the various ways in which Montana copper mine strikes were dealt with, just as the way Montana came to become a state.
I suspect you may be uncomfortable with the moral foundations of US law and how that country and its wealth came to be as well as the legal means by which one may acquire wealth in the United States.
yes, it highlights how assisted suicide will not worsen the problem, as it exists just fine without it.
but there is not talks about medical accountabilityq and transparency, which is the solution to the root issue, making the talks on assisted suicide frivolous. but i guess solving problems does not win votes.
I doubt they were trying their best, I mean other than trying to kill her and "extract wealth."
What's sad to me is the general populace thinking a "doctor" is anything more than a spineless vulture pushing whatever status-quo pill regime is hot in the pharma industry. Doctors like this should be fucking hung, I'm not joking. I don't care if you are desperate for that third mercedes. You're a scum bag trying to milk the death of an elderly lady that doesn't know any better. Really, what the fuck is the point of "healthcare" in this obviously broken industry built on exploiting health rather than fixing it.
How truly sad, it must have been so hard for her only ending up with $310 million at the end of her life.
It's far better to be old and poor in New York City, that way you can get food stamps instead of having to subsist on a paltry quarter billion dollars.
Read the story of Christina Onassis and think if you would gladly switch places with her.
If that woman lived the last 20 years of her life without friends and normal human connections - it was a prison with gold bars but prison non the less.
Why is that we always look on the poor people below us as "they deserve it", and on the richer than us that are not fortunate as "big deal - they have money" it is only us the the Goldilocks of suffering that deserve compassion from the universe.
The short wikipedia page about her seems to claim that she ran her father's business after his death for a period of 12 years. That doesn't seem like a prison with gold bars, it sounds like a career. Sure it seems like her personal life wasn't a fairytale but how many people's are?
It's deplorable that so many stole from her. But as to the title, it's even sadder how poor people were systematically stolen from, historically and I'm sure currently to some degree.
That's fine when you want to be a guy who saves kittens and fights cancer but end up leading a more mundane life. But when it comes down to not wanting to be the guy who makes a certain kind of comment, well, just don't do that. It's easy!
Under "What to Submit":
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Since it's being upvoted, then I guess it's gratifying enough people's intellectual curiosity.
Most of the articles posted here are about making money, although they are biased towards making money with technology. This is more of a "hackers who want to start companies" site than purely a hacker one. Considering how many of the people on this site expect to be ridiculously wealthy at some point, I'm not surprised that a story like this made it to the front page.
I think Hacker News also has a great deal of people with a personal interest in anthropology and human psychology, since both are very relevant to a startups success, knowing people is valuable.
This is where this story brings value, because it reveals dark and sinister sides of humans, to leech from people, exploiting their generousity. Regardless of how big the fortunes are, that is incredibly deplorable.
I didn't submit it or upvote it, but read the piece and found it interesting. For me, the value to HN isn't so much of dealing with wealth but one of being that quick distraction wondering how a problem like this might be solved to better society, and whether it can be ultimately solved.
Your #1 is most of the explanation; Phil is a net.personality from way back ("Travels with Samantha", 1994), as well as a pithy writer of several perennial pieces of HN text (like: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science).
In an 1907 essay Mark Twain portrayed Clark as the very embodiment of Gilded Age excess and corruption:
He is as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag; he is a shame to the American nation, and no one has helped to send him to the Senate who did not know that his proper place was the penitentiary, with a ball and chain on his legs. To my mind he is the most disgusting creature that the republic has produced since Tweed's time.[5]