Still, The Wall Street Journal<\/em> lashed out at ProPublica, with an editorial headlined \u201cThe Smearing of Clarence Thomas.\u201d The article accused ProPublica of using loaded language to create the appearance of a scandal. For example, the paper complained, ProPublica\u2019s report called Crow\u2019s 162-foot (49 metre) private boat, which has been featured in places like the website Superyacht Fan, a \u201csuperyacht.\u201d Smear tactics!<\/p>\n Clive Palmer\u2019s super-yacht \u201cAustralia\u201d, moored at Campbell\u2019s Cove in Sydney last year.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Brook Mitchell<\/cite><\/p>\n Actually, according to a 2022 article in The New Yorker<\/em>, any yacht over 98 feet long (30 metres) is considered a superyacht within the yachting community.<\/p>\n Which got me thinking about big yachts and what they tell us about the state of society.<\/p>\n When rich people can afford to buy and operate big yachts, they do. Indeed, yachts are a highly visible indicator of inequality, the concentration of income and wealth in the hands of the few. The Gilded Age was marked by a proliferation of ever bigger, ever more elaborately furnished yachts; when JP Morgan built a large steam yacht, its 1898 launch was featured in The New York Times.<\/em><\/p>\n Conversely, the Great Compression of income disparities that took place during the 1940s and made America a relatively middle-class society for the next four decades put an end to the first golden era of superyachts. In 1955, Fortune<\/em> published a remarkable essay, \u201cHow Top Executives Live,\u201d which stressed how modest their standard of living had become compared with prewar norms. Among other things, large yachts had \u201cfoundered in the sea of progressive taxation. \u2026 Today, 75 feet is considered a lot of yacht.\u201d<\/p>\n If you had any doubts about whether we\u2019re living in an era of extreme wealth concentration, the superyacht boom should quell those doubts.<\/p>\n Now superyachts are back. Indeed, according to that New Yorker<\/em> article, we\u2019re living through \u201cthe greatest boom in the yacht business that has ever existed.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019ve spent a lot of time over the years following debates over income and wealth inequality. Ever since inequality began rising in the 1980s, there\u2019s been a sort of intellectual industry devoted to what one might call inequality denial, questioning the data showing a drastic rise in incomes and wealth at the top. Indeed, measuring things at the top can be technically tricky \u2014 the very rich are such a small group that they can be missed by random surveys, and their ability to engage in tax avoidance makes it hard to track them with tax data, too.<\/p>\n But if you had any doubts about whether we\u2019re living in an era of extreme wealth concentration, comparable to or even surpassing the Gilded Age, the superyacht boom should quell those doubts.<\/p>\n The rise of superyachts also tells us some important things about the motivations and consequences of spending by the very rich.<\/p>\n First, why do the rich buy superyachts?<\/p>\n Boating \u2014 being out on the open water, experiencing nature up close \u2014 can be a source of great joy to many people. (Not me \u2014 I\u2019m so prone to seasickness that I\u2019ve been known to return my breakfast to the ecosystem while snorkeling.) But really big yachts, which amount to floating mansions, would seem to defeat the purpose, insulating their passengers from much of the maritime experience.<\/p>\n Indeed, that 1955 Fortune article suggested that top executives were just as satisfied with the downsized vessels of their day as a previous generation had been with huge yachts. The specifications of the boat that interests the great majority of seagoing executives today are \u2018forty feet, four people, $US40,000.\u2019 In this tidy vessel the businessman of 1955 is quite happily sea-borne.\u201d (For the record, $US40,000 in 1955 would be about $US450,000 in 2022 dollars.)<\/p>\n Owning and operating a really big yacht is, however, as clear an example as you\u2019re likely to find of Thorstein Veblen\u2019s theory of conspicuous consumption \u2014 spending intended to demonstrate one\u2019s wealth and status, rather than for the direct satisfaction it yields. Indeed, the New Yorker<\/em> article suggests that demand for superyachts really took off once owning your own plane stopped being an effective status symbol: \u201cOnce it seemed that every plutocrat had a plane, the thrill was gone.\u201d<\/p>\n Yachts, however, can always be made bigger, so there\u2019s no obvious limit to the game. The status competition isn\u2019t even purely implicit: Every year Boat International hands out the World Superyacht Awards, which supposedly honour \u201cingenuity and craftsmanship\u201d \u2014 but obviously, size also matters.<\/p>\n In a way, it\u2019s quite sad: Rarely in the course of modern history has so much wealth been concentrated in the hands of so few, yet much of that wealth is being expended on zero-sum games of one-upsmanship.<\/p>\n The other point, emphasised in a guest essay this week in the Times<\/em>, is that superyachts are immensely destructive to the environment. To be fair, it\u2019s not entirely obvious whether billionaires do more environmental damage with their superyachts than they would if they spent the same amount of money in other ways. But it\u2019s possible: Shipping and aviation \u2014 presumably including superyachts and private planes \u2014 are notoriously hard to decarbonise.<\/p>\n And in general, while I\u2019m not a degrowther who believes that we must shrink the economy to save the planet, curbing extravagant and destructive spending by the very rich could be part of the solution to climate change.<\/p>\n In any case, the rise of superyachts \u2014 regardless of whether they carry Supreme Court justices \u2014 is a highly visible indicator of the extreme economic polarisation that is certainly a factor in the extreme political polarisation that is tearing our democracy apart. And if you\u2019re the kind of person who insists that calling superyachts by their name is somehow a vile smear, you\u2019re part of the problem.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Floating mansions<\/h3>\n
Status competition<\/h3>\n