The modern approach to building social networks is to encourage people to network with the kind of people they would like to become. The aphorism goes something along the lines of You are the product of the six people you most commonly associate with. This may hold true, but it encourages an extreme classist society, where the wealthy only interact with each other and exclude themselves in a disassociative way from everyone else. In doing so, they wrap themselves in a sphere of aloofity that may be a chief cause of many classist social ills.
Classism itself is solved when people at varying levels of socioeconomic stratification communicate with each other with a constructive spirit of goodwill. If millionaires and billionaires were, alongside this idea of communicating only with the people whom they want to become, also encouraged or incentivized to communicate and associate with a diverse group of people from lower socioeconomic strata, there would be more opportunity for the kind of wealth transfer that solves the core crises of a purely capitalist society. That is the crisis of capital stasis or a similar phenomenon of capital stagnation.
Capital stasis occurs when an individual or small group amasses a large sum of wealth and then doesn’t do anything with it. The capital sits as a prize or an ego trophy. The individual derives some gratification from simply having that much wealth without deploying it or distributing it. This creates a moral and economic decay, as opportunities for improved quality of life for society are lost. After a certain threshold, there is no gain in quality of life for the individual with increased capital holdings. Restated, once an individual exceeds a certain level of wealth, more wealth has an increasingly marginal and meaningless effect on quality of life.
Consider this— your neighbor Geoffrey increases his net wealth in savings from about USD $100,000 to $1,750,000. This increase will enable a significantly larger home, a new car, his ability to invest and hold a profit-making portfolio, and perhaps a more vibrant social life, among other things.
Then Geoffrey increases his wealth from over a million to thirty million. This could enable international travel, ownership of a large luxury property or a couple of vacation homes, multiple cars, and a luxury lifestyle.
Next, Geoffrey increases his wealth to over ten billion. At this point, money becomes meaningless in the same way that a hundred thousand would experience. At the multi-billion level, money is more about ownership and control of large-scale assets like corporations, commercial or industrial properties, whole portfolios of assets, and yachts or private jets. The quality of life does not markedly increase from the tens of millions to the multibillionaire level. There is no net benefit to health or well-being, but the risk of corruptive influence on morality is extreme. Billionaires tend to become insulated and removed from society to the extent that they develop a sort of psychopathic or sociopathic megalomania.
There is a difference between an increase in health and wellbeing and an increase in ostentatiousness and grandiosity. Furthermore, and perhaps most pertinently, the increase in wealth to the billionaire level could realistically provide hundreds or thousands, or perhaps tens of thousands of individuals a very significant and miraculpus increase in health and wellbeing. This is the effect of capital stasis in many economies on the planet today— hundreds of millionaires and billionaires amassing massive fortunes and troves of capital are denying basic health and well-being to tens of thousands of people.
Consequently and conclusively, a small amelioration to redirect this capital crisis might be incentivizing billionaires to develop social networks between themselves and lower socioeconomic strata— particularly those in the hundred-thousand and below classes. A small fraction of a billionaire’s wealth— only a couple of hundred or couple of thousand dollars— would be life-changing not only for those individuals but for their communities and families. If billionaires could be incentivized to occasionally make such transfers in select circumstances, it would be a major boon for societal health and well-being.
Ultimately, this should not be construed with the pipe dreams of communists or socialists. Capitalism itself tends towards monopoly when unchecked. This is the purpose of government in a capitalist economy— to ensure that entrepreneurs and corporate leaders maintain the morality necessary to practice philanthropy, which is an essential aspect of a well-functioning free market economy. Without philanthropy, capital stasis is certain. So what is outlined above is a sort of incentivized philanthropic social networking, which is currently practiced by the nudge-obsessed social psychologists working in government surveillance and big tech social media corporations.
