People selectively underestimate how rich the world's richest people are, according to a study. Increasing income inequality in many countries is driven by steep gains among the top 1% of earners. In the United States, support for policies that would redistribute wealth has not increased since the 1970s, even as the share of incomes held by the top 1% of Americans jumped from 10% to 19%.
I learned a perspective trick whenever I ridicule a price I see for something like quality clothes and such. For every additional digit in your income, remove a digit from the cost of something. Most of us are at 5 digits, and we prefer sales because 100 dollars for a pair of jeans is way too much while 10 dollars isn’t. To a 6 digit earner, the base price of affordable.
Now think of someone who earns 7 digits as year, to them a 1000 dollar piece of clothing is reasonable. To the 8 digit, a 10000 dollar piece of clothing is reasonable. If you make a billion dollars a year? A pair of jeans worth 1 million dollars is reasonable.
It’s just a thought experiment but it helps me better understand why gacha whales exist, why people buy million dollar cars, etc… It’s also just so far removed from the rest of society that it’d be laughable if it wasn’t so sad.