Hidden Brain - Radio Replay: Too Little, Too Much

Episode Date: October 27, 2018

Have you ever noticed that when something important is missing in your life, your brain can only seem to focus on that missing thing? On this week's Radio Replay, we bring you a March 2017 story about the phenomenon of scarcity, and how it can blind us to the big picture. Then, we go to the opposite end of the spectrum to look at the perils of excess. We'll bring you an October 2016 conversation with Brooke Harrington, a sociologist who wanted to know what it's like to be one of the richest people on the planet. For more on these topics, visit us at https://n.pr/2O8DkdV.

I'm Shankar Vidantam and this is Hidden Brain. My name is Brandi Drew. I'm from Detroit, Michigan. Brandi Drew has a story that may sound familiar to you, a story of poverty and debt. It's the kind of story that may lead people to quick conclusions, so pay attention to your own. Brandi is now in her late 30s,

a few years ago, her life unraveled. At the time, she ran the dining services department at a senior living facility. She'd been with a company that ran it for more than a decade. One day, she made a mistake. I was just in a rush to get home that was all. Because daycare closes at 6. I get off at 5.

It was like maybe a 10 mile drive, busy traffic area. And I knew I had to pick up diapers and the easiest thing for me, I thought would be to pick them up before I picked the baby up. So Brandy stopped at a store, ran in, and grabbed the diapers. She swiped her credit card at the self checkout station and raced out.

It turns out she used the wrong card, not her own, but the company credit card. But it was crazy as I didn't realize at that moment I didn't realize until my supervisor called me in and said, hey, what's this purchase? So has she not said anything? I don't think I would have realized that. Randy carried the card in case she needed to buy dining supplies for work. She'd never had a problem before, never been reprimanded. She thought an apology and an explanation would do.

And her response was, well, you know we have to terminate you. And I'm like, no, I didn't know that. Like, can I just pay you back? It was only, what, 12 bucks? And she said, no, in cases like that, you automatically have to terminate the employee. I just cried. I cried for like a whole day

because I couldn't believe it. I didn't want to go home and tell my kids what had happened. I didn't want to tell my husband what had happened. I just didn't know what to do at that point. I felt like a failure as a parent, because I didn't provide a good example, even though it was a mistake.

Brandy earned more than her husband, so the loss of the job hit hard. She felt like a loser. She tried to bring in money doing odd jobs like cooking takeaway meals, but the stress grew. Brandy and her husband began fighting. She had supported him when he'd been laid off a few years earlier, and she'd expected he'd do the same for her. But he felt a layoff was different.

He was mad that she'd made his stupid mistake. The final argument was that I left out the house that morning. I was going to job interviews. I had two interviews that day and I didn't purchase toilet paper. So when he got home from work that day, there was no toilet paper. When I came in with the kids, you just immediate started yelling. You can't keep yourself together, you can't do this, you can't do that, so I walked right back out the door and I never looked back. Without steady employment and a husband to help with bills, Brandy watched anxiously as her household supplies dwindled. She worried constantly about money. To make ends meet, she ordered a new credit card. The day it arrived,

Grandi tore open the envelope. She grabbed the card and ran out the door. I went straight to Walmart and I bought like a family size of toilet paper, family size of laundry detergent like I stocked up on things all at once whether than keeping it handy just in case. So I like maxed it out within the first couple of days that I had it rather than holding on to it for emergency purposes. And in that moment as she was maxing out the credit card on the household supply she needed, Brandy forgot about things that were slightly less pressing.

What I didn't think about is what about gas money? I didn't consider what gas would cost. That was like the biggest thing. It was always hard to have gas. And of course, there was the credit card bill itself. The first two months I paid the minimum payment and then I just stopped paying because I couldn't afford to pay. I didn't pay that card off until I got my tax refund the following year.

By the time I paid it off it was over $800 for a $500 card. More and more, Brandy felt trapped by death. She no longer had options. It came down to pay the bills or feed the kids. It's just overwhelming trying to juggle all of those things and still maintain a certain state of mind so that my children wouldn't see me struggle. In retrospect, Brandy can see the mistakes she made. If she had made a budget for the whole month, she might have remembered she needed to account for gas.

If she had focused on the big picture, she might not have maxed out a credit card she couldn't afford to pay back. Why did Brandy make these mistakes? It's easy to say she was being irresponsible. But here's the thing, she had always been careful and conscientious. Did something cause her to behave differently? To understand why she did this, I want to take you to a completely different time and place, because it reveals something important about Grandi's story. It's 1944, World War II is nearing its end.

Europe is on the verge of mass famine. Aid workers desperately need guidance on how to bring people back from the brink of starvation. Researchers at the University of Minnesota thought they could help. They launched a year-long experiment. As a 2002 documentary made by the University explains, the volunteers were conscientious objectors who still wanted to serve their country. The experiment? The volunteers had to go on a starvation diet. 36 young men, most of them quakers, menonites or church of brethren members,

moved into the south tower of the memorial stadium, which would be their home for a year. Many took courses at the university, even as they grew thinner and thinner. The young men became walking scarecrows. Some grew so weak and bonny they couldn't sit without cushions or raise their arms to wash their hair. I remember being a little bit critical of guys in early part who would lick their plates. I thought that was really pretty crude. Henry Schollberg was one of the volunteers. He recalled the experience in the documentary.

By the time we ran to about the second month of it, I was doing it myself. You just needed every single calorie you could get your hand on. The results of the starvation experiment were eventually published and remain an important academic reference on nutrition, famine, and eating disorders. But recently, two researchers became intrigued with the 70-year-old study for a completely different reason. They were interested in what the lack of food did, not to the body, but to the mind. I think this type of scarcity is almost like an alarm that goes off in the head, that's

saying, hey, we really need this thing addressed. We really need this thing addressed. This is Sandal Molineathan, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago's Boots School of Business. He and a colleague, Eldar Sheffier, a psychology professor at Princeton, had a theory brewing. It went like this, when you feel that something important is missing in your life, your brain starts to focus on that missing thing. When you're really desperate for something, you can focus on it so obsessively, there's no room for anything else. The researchers were just beginning to explore their hypothesis when a colleague mentioned the long ago Minnesota starvation experiment. Elder remembers being immediately fascinated by the study

and how the lack of food affected the minds of the men. They basically were very hungry and couldn't stop eating. In some sense, you'd think, given that they cannot eat, they'd rather be distracted with other things, but in fact, both subconsciously, the level of immediate reaction and their choice of conversation largely was around food. It was actually a sort of tragic comic. I mean, they planned to open restaurants,

to become restaurateurs, these memorized recipes, they compared food prices at different newspapers. That's what they were doing the whole time. They sat around looking at food-related issues. Even intentional diversions didn't work. Hunger and food had captured their minds. At some point the experimenters just felt sore for them and decided to distract them with a movie, and some of the testimonials were, they showed me this movie, I couldn't

care less about the love scenes I wanted to see the meals. Eldar suddenly realized he had seen the same kind of behavior in a completely different setting. He'd done a lot of research on the effects of poverty, and he knew poor people who sometimes behave like the starving men in Minnesota. Poor people who were lacking financial resources found it very hard to think about anything but money,

or they spend a lot of the cognitive resources, a lot of their attention on financial juggling. If starvation made people obsess over food, poverty made people obsess over how they were going to make ends meet, how to make it to next week. What's uncommon in both cases is that your head is busy with the thing you don't have enough of. The two researchers felt they were on to something. Maybe they thought the human brain is wired to respond to scarcity by tunneling in on the thing that's missing.

Sendell says this makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Picture that you have somebody from 25,000 years ago who's basically a hunter gatherer and who might need to do a variety of things such as you know get water, dover, you know, a lot of resources are needed. When they get hungry, the sort of evolutionary system wants to have an alarm that says, hey, really focus on getting you know, a lot of resources are needed. When they get hungry, the sort of the evolutionary system wants to have an alarm that says, hey, really focus on getting food into the system. And that, I think, is the basic scarcity instinct. We're hungry. And then this thing starts going off in the head saying, do you realize we're hungry? Have I mentioned we're hungry? We're hungry.

And it just keeps calling out to you. For Brandy Drew, the alarm might have sounded like this. it keeps calling out to you. For Brandy Drew, the alarm might have sounded like this. You don't have the necessities your family needs. You need to stock up. Stock up now. You need these things. And when she bought the bleach, the family sized pack of toilet paper, the snacks and juice boxes for the kids, the alarm temporarily went silent. I felt relieved that those things, the small things I didn't have

to worry about. But the reprieve from the alarm came at a huge cost. But then like I said two days later it's like okay wait a minute why didn't you save at least a hundred dollars for gas. The answer to that question, Sandel and Aldar believe, has to do with what scarcity did to Brandy. She was so focused on getting the basic necessities that she didn't have the mental capacity to attend to anything else. There's a technical term for this, it's called bandwidth. If you're downloading a movie on your home Wi-Fi network, you might find your email runs a little slower.

The movie is hogging all the available bandwidth. Send the LNLDR, say our minds, work exactly the same way. If your mind is consumed with thoughts about something, there isn't room to think about other stuff. Scarcity fills the mind with intrusive thoughts about what you do not have. It doesn't leave room for anything else. Eldar says there's a simple way to demonstrate this. Imagine trying to hold an 8 digit number in your head. And if I simply ask you to keep in mind, you know, 26717164, that just leaves you less

able to attend to other stuff. You eat less well, you pay attention to less things, etc. As you're saying that they did it now and now I didn't hear the rest of the next two sentences because I kind of remember that. I want test you. I want test your promise. But in a sense that's kind of the matter for you. So when you're busy juggling your resources, worrying about how I'm going to pay for dinner and if I pay for dinner, I will not be able to have my certificate school trip. It's that keeping an a average number in your head. There's a reason our minds work this way. Tunneling into something makes you focus on it.

Everything inside the tunnel becomes crystal clear. The problem is, you can't see anything outside the tunnel. People in the poverty tunnel are actually very good at figuring out how to stretch the money they have to make it a tomorrow or the next week. Studies show that the poor tend to be better than the rich at knowing where you can find the best deals, the cheap tube of toothpaste. Someone who is poor is often consumed with finding solutions to immediate problems. How do I get food on the table today? I'm not thinking about problems that are a few weeks away,

like the utility bill or gas money or a credit card payment. As you're checking the prices and remembering the prices and figuring out if you buy two carats will you have enough money for breakfast, you are forgetting things you're paying less attention to, your rent, your kids' homework, all the other things that make your life complete. The thing is, as a result of doing this, the underlying problem can become worse. If you don't pay your bills,

you'll be even deeper in the whole next month. Scarcity, in other words, is a trap. The scarcity trap for us is all those ways in which scarcity today, begets behaviors, which leads to even further scarcity tomorrow. And we think it's something that poor people do, busy people do. Here's another example. We think the lonely do this. So people who are lonely will often engage in social interactions in a particular way, which actually makes it harder for them to make friends.

Just as the poor focus on the money they do not have, the lonely tend to focus on the friends they do not have. The result is they try too hard to be liked. In a conversation, the lonely person might be so preoccupied with making a good impression that he can't be attention to what's actually being said, the conversation falters. Instead of appearing likeable, he's seen as awkward or flatfooted. What happens is a result? People avoid the awkward conversationalist, and the lonely person becomes even lonelier. This lens offers a new way of thinking about why people who find themselves in scarcity

seem to do things that, to an outsider, looks stupid. When you're in a hole, why would you dig yourself even deeper? Sandal says we're asking the wrong question. What if it's not the poor people are somehow deficient, but the poverty makes everyone less capable? That it's you and I tomorrow, where we become poor, would all of a sudden have the same effect? The poverty isn't some sense changing our minds. How do we know this isn't some bleeding hot theory to excuse irresponsible behavior?

Elder and Sendville wanted to test their hypothesis. If all this is true, one thing that ought to be true is the same person when they're poor should have very different cognitive capacity than when they're rich. So how would we test that? Well, Well unfortunately we don't have the kind of money to go around making poor people rich, but sugar cane farmers actually create a natural experiment for us. Yes sugar cane farmers, specifically those in India who are

paid only once a year, right after the harvest. same person a month before harvest, poor and a month after harvest, well off. Again, you have the same group of people who are poor one moment and rich the next. Send the L'Henelda tested the farmers on their long term thinking when they had no money and when they had plenty of money. The results were stunning. We found a huge difference. So we found that post-hararvis when they're well off, they have much more impulse control.

Farmers who were rich tended to think about things that would help them over the long term. This matched other research that shows, for example, that farmers who are well off tend to weed their fields more regularly than farmers who are poor. Farmers who are poor mostly focused on how to make it to next week, short term thinking. To be clear, it's not that poor people focus on immediate needs because that's all they

want to think about. It's all they can think about. Scarsity captures the mind like it did with those starving men in Minnesota. In fact, scarcity can actually lower how you perform on an IQ test. Put simply, being poor is like having just pulled an all-nighter. Now, if you've been very lucky, maybe you've never experienced what it's like to be poor, or hungry, or lonely. But, there might be another form of scarcity you have experienced. On some days we get to leave at 4 p.m. some days we don't leave till 1 a.m.

So, and then you usually start the next day at 5.30 or 6 in the morning. Usually work 80 hours is a week. When we come back, we'll find out how being overworked and exhausted can produce its own form of scarcity. I'm Shankar Vedantam and you're listening to Hidden Brain from NPR. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Eldar Shaffer and Sendal Muleinathan believe that when something you desperately need is in short supply, your brain tends to focus on that thing.

This focus can be so intense that it impedes your ability to think about anything else. What happens when the thing you're missing is time. When you're so busy, it feels like you don't have time to breathe. Let me tell you the story of a young woman named Katie. She asked us to use her middle name for reasons that will be clear in a moment. For as long as she can remember, Katie has been driven, really driven. When I was in high school, I was determined to be valedictorian, so I took a sophomore level honors biology course as a freshman in high school, and I studied around the clock.

I had no cards. I walked through the hallways with the note cards. If there was a holiday party, I brought the note cards. And I'd also studied till two or three in the morning. Katie says she wanted to be perfect at school. She eventually got to medical school, where she excelled. She graduated at the top of her class and quickly started her residency.

The new schedule was grueling. You can get in at 5.30 or 6 in the morning and you round on all your patients and then you round with the team that means you go to all the patients and check in on their plan and adjust medications, et cetera, as necessary. And then there's usually a lunch conference

where we have education and then in the afternoon we might take new patients in and keep following up on our patients. And on some days we get to leave at 4 p.m. Some days we don't leave till 1 a.m. so and then you usually start the next day at 5.30 or 6 in the morning again and you get one day off a week. Usually work 80 hours is a week. As Katie's workload grew she started to feel she couldn't afford to waste a single moment.

Instead of spending any time relaxing, she started to focus only on things directly related to her success at work. When I first started, it was just really busy, so I tried to come home and I felt like, you know, I just don't have a lot of hours, so I need to make the most of them. And I was like, okay, I need to make sure I'm exercising, keeping my body healthy, and I need to read and stay on top of things. So I'd come home after a pretty long day, and I might go walking for half an hour, and then I'd read, and then I go to sleep. But then as the time went on, I decided to try to get in more exercise, because then I

never know when I'll get enough exercise in. So I started spending all my free daylight hours walking or running outside or going to the gym up to three hours a day plus like working 15 hour days and then trying to read and then go to sleep. As she focused intensely on the things she believed were key to her professional success, Katie lost sight of things on the periphery. She didn't know it, but she was entering the tunnel of scarcity. In her case, it was scarcity brought on by a lack of time. So I wasn't going to the grocery store. My house wasn't unpacked yet and it was stressing me out. And it was just a mess. And my clothes piled up. I had a lot of dirty clothes and coming home just felt so

overwhelming I didn't want to be there and that's part of I think why I was walking so much just to get out of the house and get away from all the things I hadn't done and I also forgot to pay a bill in the mix of all of this. What did you forget to do? What bill did you forget to be? Um, it was my energy bill. The old Katie would have spotted all of this. I mean, you would just basically, at this point, almost falling apart, it sounds like. I was, I was falling apart.

There was something else. Katie had battled anorexia as a teenager. She knew she had to stay vigilant about her eating. But as she started to focus ever more intensely on work, she slipped back into some old habits. I was eating mostly vegetables and fruits, and I wasn't eating a whole lot else, maybe a cliff bar here and there.

No one knows better than a doctor about the importance of nutrition. And yet, despite all her medical training, Katie stopped taking care of herself. Here's one thing I haven't told you yet about scarcity. It can rob you of insight, insight about how your own mind is changing. Katie had no awareness that she was heading down a dangerous path. It became obvious to her only when it finally affected her work. I started to notice that I was like nearly missing things as I was reviewing for example. I admitted a diabetic and I almost didn't order insulin for them, but I did order the insulin.

But I was like, I don't think I can keep up with this anymore because if you don't give a diabetic insulin, especially if they're type one, they can have very fatal circumstances in the hospital and get really high blood sugars that can cause them to have an acidosis and end up on a ventilator. So I turned myself in at the point that I saw that it was starting to affect my work. In two months of the residency program, Katie's body and mind had withered. Things had gotten so bad she had to go to a residential treatment center. Katie struggled with two things. Her body was desperately in need of nutrition.

And her mind, she had to find a way to stop the intrusive thoughts that were consuming her. She had to... Learn how to just sit, because we weren't allowed to exercise, we weren't allowed to stand, we weren't even allowed to do jumping jacks or squats, we had to just sit. Katie's mind was filled with angry and impatient thoughts. At first I felt like I felt useless because I thought, you know, if I'm not doing something productive, what is my purpose in life. But gradually, as the program literally forced her to do nothing, Katie started to emerge from the tunnel.

She realized she had been so narrowly, relentlessly focused on one goal, doing well at work, that she'd ignored the very things she needed to succeed, moments of relaxation, like watching TV, or in her case, painting. Katie had loved art as a child, but she had put it aside because she thought it wouldn't help her become a better doctor. I'm kind of the type of person that just likes to study and then do after I've mastered it from a studies point of view. And so to just do something without instruction

is it feels very vulnerable to me, but it ended up kind of being my saving grace in my recovery and I've actually created an art room in my house. I changed my office from a work room into an art room and it has paints and watercolors and chalks and everything you can imagine and I try to go in there once a week and just create something without any expectation just for the purpose of creating it because I can. Kitty eventually returned to her residency program with a new outlook. She started doing something that Eldar and Sendele recommend to all busy people. She actually pencils time into our schedule to do nothing.

One of the big things I've done is I kind of have a date night with myself once or twice a week, where I just schedule off the night and I won't do anything with anyone else and I'll just be free for me to do what I feel like it might be watching a movie, it might be taking a soak in the tub and reading a book, or being in my art room and painting whatever comes to me. But I do, like, I prioritize that and I actually won't accept plans with friends generally when I do this. So that's one of the things I do. Katie is consciously freeing up bandwidth.

And something strange has happened as she's done so. The less consumed she feels about work, the better she does at work. Honestly, it's kind of incredible, but at work, my brain has increased its capacity for fold. I am able to hold so many more things in my consciousness at once and manage them. I've just seen a really huge improvement in my ability to enjoy being in the company of others, to enjoy like occasions and to enjoy my work and do well at my work. While the psychological studies into scarcity and bandwidth are relatively new, the ideas are actually ancient. Avoid tunnel vision, keep difficult things in one

part of your life from contaminating everything else. Be present. See you have a big deadline tomorrow for something you've got to finish. You go home and you're spending the evening with your kids. And in that moment, you're not present focused at all. What you're focused on is that deadline. You may go through minutes where you didn't hear what your kids were saying to you, because your mind keeps going to the southern side. Tunnel vision is not in itself a good thing or a bad thing.

Shouting out distractions can be helpful at times. The question is, do you know when you're inside the tunnel? To me that's exactly the heart of managing scarcity. It's recognizing when are you trying to do something related to your scarcity or you really want to use that instinct? And when have you made a conscious decision to do something else? Where what you really need to do is to not have it in fruit on that something else. You're at home, you're with your kids, you chose to be a parent for that three-hour period.

You really don't want scarcity to improve them. Of course, it's easy to say, build free time into your schedule. Stay present with your family, take a vacation. These strategies presume you have choices. You can't say I've had it with being lonely, I'm going to take a vacation from being lonely. It's not a choice. And to me loneliness and poverty are the forms of scarcity that feel the biggest because

while all these forces are at play, there's no release valve, there's no escape mechanism. Elder and Sendoel want policy makers to design solutions that recognize how scarcity creates traps from which many people may not be able to extricate themselves, and they want the rest of us to stop preaching to those in poverty. If you look at programs at poverty, we often confound a little bit the attempts to help the poor, with the attempts to educate them. Make sure they show up in time, that they do the right things. From the perspective, we're taking with scarcity in some sense, if I'm very busy juggling

a very complicated life, insisting that I show up at the office at 8 and not 805, is not doing me a favor, I don't need to be educated. It's just hard to manage. You know, the transportation is not reliable. My kid is not ready. I don't have a babysitter. I'm going to make mistakes that it's not clear educating me in quotes about them is going to help me at all. It just makes my life all the more complicated. When people in poverty fail or make mistakes, the researchers think we should respond to them the same way we respond to mistakes made by airline pilots. There was a time not long ago when we thought that airline pilots who made mistakes were just bad pilots.

Sendle says a big reason air travel has become safer in recent decades is that there has been a shift in thinking about such mistakes. Designers have made cockpits fault tolerant. Rather than trying to find perfect pilots, cockpits are now designed to account for human error. The goal is to alert pilots when they've made a mistake and to diminish the consequences of mistakes. It's ironic that when we design cockpits, the entire mantra of fault tolerance seems so intuitive, but when we design social policies, nobody's out there talking about, let's make this fault tolerant. I mean, you know, poor people have a lot on their mind, they're bandwidth attacks, they're going to make mistakes. Let's make sure this program is robust when they do make that mistake. It's just not the way we think.

If I offer a training program, I don't sit there and say, let me make sure, you know, what's going to happen? This is for low income individuals. Surely they're going to miss a few days because, know it's hard to get to class sometimes or other things around their mind. So let me design this curriculum so that it's in attendance tolerant. So even if somebody misses three days in a row they'll be able to come on that fourth day and still feel caught up. In fact, a training curriculum is often quite the opposite. If you miss three days in a row, it's an invitation to miss the fourth day because you're not going to get anything.

Brandy Drew eventually turned her life around. She found a low-income assistance program that offered her help. She walked with a financial counselor who gave her strategies for budgeting her money and keeping track of long-term priorities. I actually have a calendar now that I write down everything to make sure I'm paying things on the correct day and time. It's taken time and little steps but Brandy is no longer in the scarcity tunnel. She's been working for a few years now and she has savings. I know that if anything happens, God forbid if I lose this job, I know that I can survive for at least six months if I have to look for another.

Eldar and Sendal themselves say that they are constantly trying to keep the lessons of scarcity, front and center in their own lives. As a busy academic, Eldar has come up with a rule. When an invitation to an event two months down the road comes along, he asks himself whether he would attend the event if it were tomorrow. If the answer is no, he declines the invitation because his life is not going to be any less hectic two months from now. Preserving bandwidth, Dix conscious effort, most of us, Eldar included, are going to violate the Eldar rule. We'll say yes to new commitments when we don't have the time

or pull out a credit card when we can't afford it. In those moments, it's important to look up. To notice, we are inside a tunnel. After the break, we're going to switch gears and move from scarcity to excess. It turns out that having too much can have its own set of problems. When you're really wealthy, it's not uncommon to have the experience that everyone is out to get a piece of you. So it breeds a kind of suspicion.

Why are you being nice to me? Are you just trying to get me to give you something? And that must be very unpleasant. I'm Shankar Vedantam and you're listening to Hidden Brain. This is NPR. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Have you ever wondered what it's like to be rich? Taking all of her for detox in the Hamptons,

standardized testing has really stressed him out. Really rich? Why are you wearing a tux? It's after sex, would I am I a farmer? Private jet to your island estate in the Caribbean? Rich? I mean it's one banana, Michael. What could it cost?

$10? Most of us will never know what that's like. But if you've ever been at least a little curious about the lives of the Uber wealthy, this next segment is for you. Brook Harrington is a sociologist at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. Several years ago, she decided to explore the secret lives of billionaires. Her strategy become a wealth manager. Brook discovered that in order to manage money for the super rich, wealth managers learn a lot about the private lives of their clients

and the very different set of rules that govern their world. Brook Harrington, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you for having me on the show. For wealth managers to do their job, Broke, I understand that they need to find out everything about a client's life, not just a client's financial life, but everything about their life. Give me some examples of the kind of conversations people have with wealth managers and the kind of issues they bring up about their personal circumstances that might affect how their wealth is managed.

Well, it usually starts with what's called know your client activity. So if you were to come to me with me acting as the wealth manager, I would first ask to see some proof of identity like your passport, and then we would talk about what goals you had for your wealth and that begins the series of increasingly delicate and increasingly intrusive questions. Then usually we get into whatever real reason is bringing you to me. Maybe you want to avoid your taxes. Maybe you really don't like your family.

That's surprisingly common among wealthy people. For example, if you have a relative or if you yourself are engaging in some activity that might get you extorted, it may not be illegal, but it might be socially shameful. That's a financial risk that your wealth manager needs to know about. If you have a son or daughter with a drug problem, that's a financial risk that your wealth manager needs to know about. There can also be issues like I think I'm headed for a divorce, but I don't want my spouse to get half my assets. How do I

hide those assets? Preferably offshore, so that whatever is legally provable as mine is such a small amount that it's not worth fighting about. So it's already interesting because these professionals in some ways get to know their clients better than the client's own family or friends or even their own spouse. Yes, it's apparently something of a cliche in the offshore world that the average client is a man in his 50s with a secret family somewhere. Might be a gay lover, might be a common law wife, and some children, but they're usually all sorts of secrets

that these wealthy folks wish to keep hidden, and that they have the additional privilege of being able to hire people to take care of in secret. So I understand you conducted about 65 interviews in 18 countries for this book. Tell me a little bit about the people you met. To be a wealth manager, you have to understand finance and the law. But this kind of wrote also calls for a certain psychological makeup.

What kind of person becomes a wealth manager? Well, several of the people I spoke to describe themselves in only somewhat joking terms as social workers for the rich. So you have to have empathy and a desire to help people, but also a very high tolerance for people who would otherwise seem to be so extremely privileged that you might be otherwise inclined to smack them around and say snap out of it. You're lucky. You write in your book about the extreme lengths

that some managers go to please their clients or to provide services to their clients. You write about a manager named Alan Orin Geneva, who said that one of her clients once called her from outside a restaurant in London. Tell me that story. So this is one of the first stories that I heard that really made my eyebrows raise. While I was training to be a wealth manager, Eleanor told this story over lunch of receiving a phone call from a client who was in another country saying I've just lost my bracelet outside of a restaurant helped me find it. And the client didn't identify the restaurant by name. So imagine having someone call you from another country.

I mean, obviously the country was identified, but not anything remotely approaching a location. So you have to sort of marvel at the immaturity of the client expecting someone else to help her fix a problem like this. But Eleanor somehow did it. She determined where the client was and what exactly had been lost and got the local authorities on the case, found the bracelet and build the client for all the time. And apparently the client was happy to pay.

There are sometimes clients do make requests like this, not because they are acting childish, but because they actually have an ulterior motive. They actually want to test the loyalty's or ability off the wealth manager. You tell the story of a wealth manager in Hong Kong named David. Yes, he got a call early on in his relationship with a client in which the client said that he was in Japan and he was meeting with a Japanese gentleman who had expressed a desire for smoked salmon, and that this client had promised him, I think, a thousand sides of smoked salmon straight from the factory

in Scotland, and was now calling David saying, get me the salmon. And David said, well, I'm your wealth manager, not your fishmonger. And the client said, well, today you're the fishmonger. And so David happens to know someone who knew the head of the Smokesammon factory in Scotland and he fulfilled the client's wish. And the client later told him, I basically made up that story. I wasn't sitting across from a Japanese fellow who wanted a thousand sides of Smokesammon. I just needed to see that you had the connections and the will to do what I wanted when I wanted

and not ask any questions. One thing that I got from your book is that there are important ways in which the very rich are very much like the rest of us and ways in which they are not. So wealthy people, unsurprisingly, turn out to have troubled marriages and wayward children, just like, you know, everybody else. But wealth, you argue, can compound those challenges. Well, apparently it's not uncommon for the wealth manager to be asked to find or recommend rehab facilities for kids. Or a parent will ask a wealth manager to break some bad news to the next generation to his or

her own children. Sometimes the wealth manager has to broker a truce between feuding family members. Say one family member feels that they've been done done by unfairly in the inheritance plan and has to be somehow brought back in so that they don't sue the family. The big risk here is if you have a disgruntled family member who sews, the lawsuit process in many countries makes public many, many private documents that would reveal the extent and nature of a family's wealth, all of which have been carefully guarded secrets. My guest today is a sociologist Brooke Harrington. She spent years trying to understand the lives of people who are so wealthy that they're able to circumvent the constraints of national

laws and borders. In the course of her many interviews with wealth managers, Brooke talked to one professional in Switzerland who told her a revealing story. So this wealth manager and her boss had been summons to a country outside of Europe by a client who was sending a private plane for them. She showed up at the Zurich airport with her boss waiting for this plane and she discovered that she'd left her passport back home in a different purse and she said to her boss, I've got to go home and get my passport because we're leaving Europe. And he said, don't worry about it. And she discovered that she'd left her passport back home in a different purse. And she said to her boss, I've got to go home and get my passport because we're leaving Europe. And he said, don't worry about it.

And she said again, no, they're going to check my passport. They won't let me leave Switzerland, much less enter another country. I've got to go home. And he said, no, really, don't worry about it. So she didn't say anything for their figuring, you know, it would be his problem if she got refused the right to leave. Sure enough, the private plane pulls up, they get on it, nobody checks the passport. It lands in this other country outside Europe, nobody checks the passport, they get into

the private car sent by the client, they're taken to the client's home, they have their meeting, private car takes them back to the private plane, private plane flies them back to Switzerland, they get off the plane and go home. At no point has anyone encountered passport control or a customs agent. And this wealth manager's comment was, the lives of the richest people in the world are so different from those of the rest of us. It's almost literally unimaginable. National borders are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. The laws are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. It's potentially very very dangerous and I think she's

right about that. You spoke with the wealth manager named Dieter. I think this was a German wealth manager who talked about how his job allowed him to shmooze with powerful people, but also in some ways discovered things about foreign countries before even the citizens of those countries would find out about those important things. Yeah, he was very proud of the fact that when he was working in Africa, he would have parties and the heads of state of the various countries he lived in would come to his house and he'd get them drunk and they'd be spilling state secrets by two in the morning. parties and the heads of state of the various countries he lived in would come to his house

and he'd get them drunk and they'd be spilling state secrets by two in the morning. And then people like Catherine Graham, the late publisher of the Washington Post, would call him up for advice. And you know, he could speak authoritatively about at least affairs in some African countries because he'd heard it directly from the mouths of the people who made those policies. It reminds me a little bit about what we learned when the Panama paper scandal broke. I kept seeing photos or drawings of the faces of people whose names turned up in the Panama papers and it was really a rogue's gallery of people from all walks of life, as well as heads of state and corporate leaders, people who you would

think have nothing in common with each other. But at one level, the fact that they are so rich gives them these very important things in common, which is to say, for them, national boundaries and laws are all optional. Taxes are optional. All forms of law are essentially, at that level of wealth. So this has come up recently in the US presidential election, when Donald Trump suggested that not paying federal taxes or avoiding federal taxes legally, I might add, for several years, made him actually someone who was smart.

He didn't pay any federal income tax. So, it makes me smart. As you tell me about these very rich people, drawn from different walks of life who have this thing in common, the fact they're very wealthy, talk a little bit about their attitude toward taxes and their attitude and obligations in some ways to footing the common bill. Some of them actually do sound a lot like Donald Trump. When I heard Donald Trump say that not paying taxes made him smart, and that if he had paid his taxes, they would have been wasted anyways. I was like, yep, he's the voice of a lot of very wealthy people around the world and

their wealth managers who said essentially the same thing to me. They are very committed to neoliberal ideology and very committed to the idea that these elite clients are doing the world a favor as wealth creators. So I'm fascinated because what you're saying is that in effect the wealthy and their tax managers don't just think they're doing something that's practical and expedient. You're saying they actually feel like they're doing the moral thing? There is a very strong component of ideology here. You see this in the Wealth Management Training Program. You see it among at least about a quarter of the people I interviewed really seem to believe quite unironically in the justice of protecting the wealth of

their clients from taxation. They literally view taxation as theft and they view government in general as being incompetent at best, corrupt at worst, and they're deeply suspicious of any sort of welfare state programs because they see it as destroying initiative. I think a lot of people have impressions of the lives of the very wealthy and imagine what life must be like when you're jetting around on a private plane and being waited on by service staff all the time. And I'm wondering in your conversations with wealth managers whether any of your own assumptions or beliefs about the connections between wealth and happiness were either confirmed or challenged.

I was struck by a man I spoke to in the Channel Islands who talked about how suspicious wealthy people are. It jibed with some things that I've seen personally. And what he said was, when you're really wealthy, it's not uncommon to have the experience that everyone is out to get a piece of you. It's like what happens to a lot of re-winners, all sorts of so-called relatives come out of the woodwork, asking for loans, asking for help of some sort. Con artists come out of the woodwork, looking to get a piece of you. But that's what happens throughout the lifetime of wealthy people. And so it breeds a kind of suspicion. Why do you want to be my friend? Why are you

being nice to me? Are you just trying to get me to give you something? How that would lead at the extreme to a sort of Howard Husey and retreat or isolation from people, because if you can't trust anyone, why bother? I mean, the sad thing that you're saying is that the wealth manager might end up being perhaps among the very few people that a rich person can trust. Yeah, I think that seems to be a common story. It's wealthy people and their servants. It almost comes to the point where you can, if you're a wealthy person, you are more trusting of the people you pay to be in your service than the people you don't pay because with your family, you might have sort of

a kinglier problem, which of my children actually loves me and which are out to get something from me. But at least when you are having a transactional relationship with an employee, at least the boundaries there are clear. You're paying them for certain services and you can assess whether they are giving you those services at the standard you require. If they're not, you fire them, if they're doing a good job, you keep them on. There's a simplicity to that that is not present in emotional relationships.

Brooke Harrington is a sociologist at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. She is the author of the book Capital Without Borders, Wealth Managers and the 1%. Broke, I want to thank you for talking with me today. Thank you. This episode of Hidden Grain was produced by Jenny Schmidt, Renee Clark, Raina Cohen, Maggie Penman, Chloe Connolly, Chris Benderev, Parth Shah and Laura Quarelle. Our editor was Tara Boyle, our team includes Thomas Liu and Camilla Vargas. If you liked this episode please be sure to subscribe to our podcast and please tell one friend who might enjoy our show. Thanks for listening. I'm Shankar Vidantum. See you next week.