Income Inequality and Socioeconomic Acrophobia

In case you missed it this weekend, Tom Perkins, a billionaire who co-founded the firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and has become a successful venture capitalist wrote a short letter to the editors of The Wall Street Journal comparing class tensions in the San Francisco Bay Area and anger towards the one percent to Kristallnacht, or “The Night of Broken Glass,” in which a series of coordinated attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany in 1938 left scores of people dead, and tens of thousands of Jews incarcerated and sent to concentration camps.

Yes, the comparison was obviously problematic and many other venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen distanced themselves from Perkins’s comments, as did the firm Perkins co-founded.

Tom Perkins has not been involved in KPCB in years. We were shocked by his views expressed today in the WSJ and do not agree.

— Kleiner Perkins (@kpcb) January 25, 2014

Despite the criticism, Perkins followed up with an email to Bloomberg defending his analogy: “In the Nazi area it was racial demonization, now it is class demonization,” Perkins wrote.

Perkins obviously has strong viewpoints about economic inequality yet has no thoughts about what should be done about it — just, “Well, this is just how I feel!” venting.

Josh Marshall, the editor and publisher of Talking Points Memo, wrote about why the feelings Perkins has aren’t uncommon among the rich, and defined it as “socioeconomic acrophobia”:

Quite simply, these were and are folks who just weren’t used to public criticism. The whole “masters of the universe” mythology was basically, sure we’re massively wealthy. But we’re also the ones keeping the globe we all live on from spinning off its axis. So let us enjoy our Hamptons estates and our private jets in peace and we’ll do our jobs and you do yours. The crossfire hurricane that ripped apart that social contract stung a lot.

Pro-tip: If you want to have a compelling discussion about economic inequality, leave Nazi Germany out of it.

Photo: C.J. Martin

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