LIFE AROUND SUPERCARS IS BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH
In Iran, the people revolted. In Metro Vancouver, the people merely shake their heads.
The ordinary people of Iran this year took to the streets en masse to protest the way the children of the wealthy were showing off their outrageous toys and decadent lifestyle in the streets and on social media.
Iran erupted in countrywide protests over rich millennials who fail to keep their privilege in check, including on showy, indulgent social media sites such as Instagram’s the richkidsofiran. When Maseratis roar through the busy streets of Tehran, pedestrians often unleash curses on the drivers.
In Metro Vancouver — which has been dubbed the supercar capital of the world — people are more inclined to simply frown, smirk or whisper their displeasure at the way drivers, many of them students, are flaunting their family’s apparently bottomless riches by tooling around in flashy supercars.
In a city that is becoming increasingly unequal in regards to housing, leisure lifestyle, education and other spheres, scholars are beginning to explore whether the flaunting of high-status toys like sports cars is contributing to the stress and unhappiness of those who have to witness it.
It’s no accident the University of B.C. has been nicknamed the University of Beautiful Cars. A popular encyclopedia-style website features hundreds of amateur photos taken on UBC campus of Lamborghinis, Aston Martins, Porsches, Mercedes and Ferraris, with many sporting “N” signs to designate their drivers are novices.
When Rolls-Royce unveiled its first SUV in North America this year, it chose Vancouver to do so. And it sold six on the first day — starting at $399,000 each, reported Natalie Obiko Pearson. The majority of Rolls-Royce customers in Vancouver, said a company representative, are high-net-worth immigrants, mostly moms and students, 70 per cent of whom are Asian. A wealth report by Knight Frank ranks Canada as among the most likely places that the world’s ultra wealthy — those worth at least $30 million — want to emigrate to.
When it comes to capitalist symbolism in Vancouver, it’s fitting the free-market think-tank, the Fraser Institute, which often champions globalization and the transnational rich, is on the fourth floor of a building at 1770 Burrard St. that has an Aston Martin and Bentley dealership on the ground floor. Situated in a neighbourhood peppered with luxury-car outlets, the building is owned by a numbered company whose directors include Michael Walker, the Fraser Institute’s founder.
There are human ramifications, however, to the conspicuous consumption exemplified by sleek autos. Scholars have found convincing scientific evidence showing people are literally less healthy in societies with large gaps between the rich and the rest.
The authors of the influential study The Spirit Level, epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, maintain most human factors rank worse in more unequal advanced countries, such as Britain and the U.S., compared with the least unequal ones, such as Norway, Finland and Japan. People in unequal countries are more prone to chronic stress, anxiety, depression, addiction, unnecessary spending, obesity, heart disease and gambling.
A scholar in Finland, which tops the list in the United Nation’s World Happiness Report, suggests his fellow citizens’ well-being is in part owed to the way they realize showy consumption is a downer for others.
“Finland is a very equal and egalitarian society,” says Timo Hamalainen, who is with the large SITRA Foundation. Hamalainen told UBC economist emeritus John Helliwell, co-author of the UN’s report, that in Finland “even the rich try to hide their wealth to some extent. This means the social status differences are small, which could minimize problems with social esteem.”
Helliwell pointed to one highly cited study comparing luxury consumption in Western and southeast Asian cultures, which found “Southeast Asians pay a great deal of attention to possessions that are both public and visible, such as designerlabelled goods, expensive cars, jewelry, etc.”
The authors of the study, Nancy Wong and Aaron Ahuvia, said economic status is a central value in newly industrialized southeast Asian societies. Displaying luxury autos, Wong and Ahuvia said, “may reflect the value that an interdependent self places on social conformity in a materially focused, family-oriented and hierarchical culture.”
When I asked the author of the popular book and movie, Crazy Rich Asians, about the rush of Asian capital into Metro Vancouver housing and retail outlets in recent decades, Kevin Kwan said one of the reasons people from China drive supercars in B.C. is that the country’s Communist leaders have ordered the children of the super-rich to stop showing off.
“The government of China has really clamped down on displays of extreme ostentation. And so the wealth has gone to cities like Vancouver. This is where they go to have fun,” Kwan said. “They can’t race their Lamborghinis in China. There’s no tolerance for it. So they race in Vancouver and Sydney and places where they’re less accountable if they’re caught.”
There’s little doubt unequal status can lead to unhappiness and resentment. One recent study of airlines by Harvard and University of Toronto researchers found more air rage on flights with first-class cabins. Aggression grows even worse when economy passengers are humbled by walking through the first-class section.
Even with such solid studies, Helliwell says it’s hard to find research comparing “the life evaluations” of people who buy Lamborghinis with those who watch them drive by. It’s tempting to infer, he said, that displays of luxury will “spillover on the average life satisfaction” of those who witness it. In response to my questioning, Helliwell has initiated some related polling and research.
Meanwhile, the number of supercars and supercar dealerships in the city continues to expand. “Canada is quite a massively developing market” for high-end vehicles, Rolls-Royce executive Torsten Muller- Otvos told Obiko Pearson, while sitting in his Vancouver showroom. “We see this market going from one record to the next.”
Another remarkable sign of the uptick in Metro’s uberwealthy is that some new condominiums are being built not for people, but for their cars. The ChineseEnglish website of one says the air-conditioned, highsecurity supercar units have sold briskly. Which points to another justification for Metro residents to shake their heads over the rapid rise of supercars; a concern that goes beyond the potential loss of self-esteem based on inequality. And that, according to law enforcement officials, is that luxury cars, like mansions, can be excellent vehicles to launder dirty money.
It’s why B.C. Attorney General David Eby, who has already investigated hundreds of millions of dollars worth of money-laundering in the province’s casinos, launched an effort this year targeting illicit cash that may be fuelling the sale of supercars, as well as Metro Vancouver’s absurdly expensive housing market.
I wonder what the people of Iran would think?
Another remarkable sign of the uptick in Metro’s uber-wealthy is that some new condominiums are being built not for people, but for their cars.