Of the 3,144 counties in the United States, the one with the highest per capita income is Teton County, Wyoming. It’s also the most unequal: Ninety percent of all income is made by 8 percent of households. Its average per capita income is $194,485, and the average income for the top 1 percent in the county is an astonishing $28.2 million.
Justin Farrell, an associate professor of sociology at Yale and a Wyoming native, spent six years interviewing the ultra-wealthy as well as the working poor in Teton County and studying the effects of wealth on this community. The result of his research is an illuminating and provocative new book, Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West. He spoke to reporter Nick Romeo.
Most people do not associate wealth inequality and environmentalism. What’s the connection you found?
The ultrarich use nature to solve dilemmas they face. The first dilemma is economic. So you made all this money: How much should you share it, how should you enjoy it, and how should you protect and multiply it? Conservation has all sorts of benefits economically. People say that they move to Teton County for the beautiful ecosystem, the wildlife and all that, but the other major reason, the primary reason really, is it’s a tax haven. I try to show that not all tax havens are off in these faraway islands, some of them are right here in the pristine mountains of the American West: Wyoming does not have corporate tax or income tax and often sits atop Bloomberg’s wealth-friendly states rankings. So you see dollars flooding in, which impacts the fabric of the community itself. In Teton County in 1980, only 30 percent of income came from financial investments, but by 2015, $8 out of every $10 in this community was made from financial investments.
I’m a big proponent of conservation, but I don’t think we look enough at who benefits from conservation, not only in terms of tax breaks but in terms of how it affects property values and low-income people who can no longer live anywhere near where they work. Some people have to drive over an 8,000-foot mountain pass every day to get to work in the dead of a Wyoming winter. So the area is transformed into an ultra-exclusive enclave, where you need the money to buy entry. It’s basically become a gated community to the extreme.
What are the other dilemmas that the rich use nature to solve?
The second dilemma is social: How do they wrestle with the stigma of being ultra-wealthy? They are burdened by a social stigma that they are greedy, and they often feel like they’ve sacrificed something along the way to wealth. So they use nature combined with a romantic view of rural people as a way to transform themselves. I found this pattern where they create versions of themselves that they view as more authentic, more virtuous, more small-town and community-minded.
The interesting thing is that they model their personal transformation on this notion of the working poor in the rural West, especially in outdoors-oriented places. They tend to romanticize them. The image is of someone with a low-status career who doesn’t have a lot of material goods but is living close to the earth, in nature, and maybe they’re going skiing or hiking, or maybe they live in a camper van, and they are free from the traps of wealth and power that the rich have had to navigate their whole careers. The rich imagine that the working poor live more of an outdoor life of contentment, are more authentic, simpler, and that they enjoy a special kinship with nature and integration into the small-town community. All that becomes central to how the ultra-wealthy transform themselves—it’s a yearning among the ultra-wealthy for this love of a bygone small-town character kind of mixed with the cowboy ethos.
You talk in the book about how the ultrarich basically play dress-up—they wear Wranglers and plaid shirts. They pull on leather cowboy boots and drive rugged trucks.
Yeah, the dress was very surprising to me. I did not go into this project focused on how those folks dressed, but it turned out to be such a communicator of something deeper and more important. Dress was an outward performance of their conversion to this way of life, of what they view as this way of life. The image is built on half-truths and a really romanticized view of the working poor, especially in this community, where the reality of the working poor tends to be two immigrant families living in a single trailer, with the adults working two or three jobs. But that’s not how the wealthy see it. This performance also includes making friends with people who are just scraping by and going out into nature with these people, whether it’s their ski guides or fishing guide.
Justin Farrell, an associate professor of sociology at Yale and a Wyoming native, spent six years interviewing the ultra-wealthy as well as the working poor in Teton County and studying the effects of wealth on this community. The result of his research is an illuminating and provocative new book, Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West. He spoke to reporter Nick Romeo.
Most people do not associate wealth inequality and environmentalism. What’s the connection you found?
The ultrarich use nature to solve dilemmas they face. The first dilemma is economic. So you made all this money: How much should you share it, how should you enjoy it, and how should you protect and multiply it? Conservation has all sorts of benefits economically. People say that they move to Teton County for the beautiful ecosystem, the wildlife and all that, but the other major reason, the primary reason really, is it’s a tax haven. I try to show that not all tax havens are off in these faraway islands, some of them are right here in the pristine mountains of the American West: Wyoming does not have corporate tax or income tax and often sits atop Bloomberg’s wealth-friendly states rankings. So you see dollars flooding in, which impacts the fabric of the community itself. In Teton County in 1980, only 30 percent of income came from financial investments, but by 2015, $8 out of every $10 in this community was made from financial investments.I’m a big proponent of conservation, but I don’t think we look enough at who benefits from conservation, not only in terms of tax breaks but in terms of how it affects property values and low-income people who can no longer live anywhere near where they work. Some people have to drive over an 8,000-foot mountain pass every day to get to work in the dead of a Wyoming winter. So the area is transformed into an ultra-exclusive enclave, where you need the money to buy entry. It’s basically become a gated community to the extreme.
What are the other dilemmas that the rich use nature to solve?
The second dilemma is social: How do they wrestle with the stigma of being ultra-wealthy? They are burdened by a social stigma that they are greedy, and they often feel like they’ve sacrificed something along the way to wealth. So they use nature combined with a romantic view of rural people as a way to transform themselves. I found this pattern where they create versions of themselves that they view as more authentic, more virtuous, more small-town and community-minded.
The interesting thing is that they model their personal transformation on this notion of the working poor in the rural West, especially in outdoors-oriented places. They tend to romanticize them. The image is of someone with a low-status career who doesn’t have a lot of material goods but is living close to the earth, in nature, and maybe they’re going skiing or hiking, or maybe they live in a camper van, and they are free from the traps of wealth and power that the rich have had to navigate their whole careers. The rich imagine that the working poor live more of an outdoor life of contentment, are more authentic, simpler, and that they enjoy a special kinship with nature and integration into the small-town community. All that becomes central to how the ultra-wealthy transform themselves—it’s a yearning among the ultra-wealthy for this love of a bygone small-town character kind of mixed with the cowboy ethos.
You talk in the book about how the ultrarich basically play dress-up—they wear Wranglers and plaid shirts. They pull on leather cowboy boots and drive rugged trucks.
Yeah, the dress was very surprising to me. I did not go into this project focused on how those folks dressed, but it turned out to be such a communicator of something deeper and more important. Dress was an outward performance of their conversion to this way of life, of what they view as this way of life. The image is built on half-truths and a really romanticized view of the working poor, especially in this community, where the reality of the working poor tends to be two immigrant families living in a single trailer, with the adults working two or three jobs. But that’s not how the wealthy see it. This performance also includes making friends with people who are just scraping by and going out into nature with these people, whether it’s their ski guides or fishing guide.
by Nick Romeo, Daily Beast | Read more:
Image: Brownie Harris/Corbis via Getty
