Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West

by Justin Farrell

What most people don’t know is that the grandeur of its wilderness is matched by the awe-inspiring concentration of wealth and a canyon-size gap between the rich and poor there: It is both the richest county in the United States2 and the county with the nation’s highest level of income inequality.

Rather, my goal is to gather facts that allow us to better understand a rarely studied and little known but highly influential group.

By living in such rural and nature-oriented communities, they are literally buying into the idea and experience of a primordial America that offers salvation from the careerist rat-race and the moral temptations of high society where life is simpler, and the honest rural values of the dusty cowboy, noble native, and nature-loving bohemian prevail.

Empathy is more naturally given to the people and communities obviously suffering harm, rather than, say, a Wall Street financier who struggles with the life complexities and social-psychological dilemmas that accompany immense wealth and power.

Similarly, people of great wealth and power do not often expose themselves to vulnerability, which entails loss of control and is a complete reversal of their accustomed role. One mechanism protecting ultra-wealthy people from vulnerability is the remarkable level of deference they enjoy in their day-to-day lives, both from people at work (for example, administrative assistants and other staff) and from people they encounter as they go about their normal routines (for example, wait staff, salespeople, caretakers). This position of social dominance means that they are rarely subject to honest scrutiny, especially outside their workplaces.

Might the ultra-wealthy’s interactions with the natural environment—whether through recreation, philanthropy, or spiritual encounters—serve to canonize and valorize a particular elite experience of nature for the rest of us to emulate?

Thus, this community, and the meteoric rise of folks like Jim, are not as unique as we might think. Each are simply products of these broader winds of change and emblematic of this new era of wealth concentration in which we all—including Jim—now live.

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce,3 Teton County has the highest per capita income of all 3,144 counties in the United States, at $194,485. In a distant second is New York County (Manhattan) at $148,002, and the lowest in the nation is Wheeler County, Georgia, at $15,787. Median family income in Teton County is also sky high at $96,113, putting it in the top 2.6 percent of all U.S. counties.

In other words, we see skyrocketing income levels in this community because people moving in are leveraging wealth they have already made to create more.

Talking with Colin, I can tell that his decision to buy a place up here is not simply about escaping from high-tax environments, but it’s also about being in what he perceives to be a more friendly “Wild West” cultural environment where he feels more insulated from exploitation by the federal government. “We needed a place where we could live among like-minded people.… Besides marrying my wife, it’s the best thing I ever did.”

From top to bottom, the entitlement of privacy was an institutional product that the club worked hard to create, commodify, manage, and instill in its members as an inherent right.

challenging the popular assumption that environmental conservation is an altruistic public good, and suggests that conservation itself can become a tool for economic gain, social prestige, and exclusion.

I call an Environmental Veneer—by which I mean the simplistic popular assumption that environmental conservation is assumed to be, in a vague sense, an altruistic public good, rather than a vehicle for protecting wealth, achieving social status and integration, expressing group identity, sustaining societal advantages, and generally reinforcing many of the social mechanisms that give rise to environmental problems in the first place.

When money or resources are used for the purpose of enjoying the aesthetic tonic of nature, the typical contradictions or moral hazards no longer pertain: excessive consumerism doesn’t pose a threat to personal character or to the sustainable future of the globe.

No doubt, I found that among the ultra-wealthy, there is a feeling that looking after nature is the right thing to do. Yet, their assumptions that it is virtuous or altruistic is often undercut by the fact that their environmental concern is circumscribed to issues that benefit people with wealth.

Philanthropy became a valuable form of social currency in the community, and a status market emerged that conveyed higher prestige on some charitable issues, but not others.

Indeed, ultra-wealthy optimism about the charitable spirit of the community holds some truth, but these perceptions assume charity of a certain kind for a certain purpose, benefiting a certain people.

Certainly, it is impossible to isolate people’s true motives, mostly because human motives aren’t as singular as we like to think they are. Most rich philanthropists are neither entirely good Samaritans, giving altruistically for the purity of a cause, nor are they entirely evil colonialists with hidden self-interest or ideas of self-aggrandizement. In reality, ultra-wealthy philanthropy is often a combination of these clichés, a multilayered tapestry woven together by both altruism and self-interest, framed by the moral and political meanings they attach to their lives, their wealth, and their causes.

Beginning with the first, there is a widespread view that connection to nature—the dirt, rocks, trees, animals, elevation, open air, and so on—are among the most authentic experiences we humans can have. These nature-experiences are in stark contrast to society, which is entirely unnatural and the product of flawed humans. Nature is viewed as intrinsically honorable, unselfish, and True.

Upper-class longing for this culture, and continued engagement with it, is not an amusing anomaly, but signals something important. The longing for Old West traditions—qualities like frontier grit, honest work, common sense, rugged symbolism of the cowboy, closeness to nature of native tribes, and material contentment in rural environs—are an especially appealing antidote to counteract the loss of authenticity felt by some ultra-wealthy.

“the wealthy want to establish themselves in the community, socially and in terms of status. But they are also searching for meaning. The quickest way to do this is to start a nonprofit around some environmental issue that they believe is important.

But as I’ve shown, ultra-wealthy power is born from a mixture of motives, and money disproportionately flows to nature and arts, both of which are taken as an unquestionable good benefiting the entire community.

Money is power in this community and across the New West because it promotes what I have called “compensation” and “connoisseur” conservation, and is more deeply motivated by an attempt to recapture what was lost, to preserve the myths of the Old West, to achieve authenticity, to make a big Rockefeller-type conservation splash, to be socially integrated into elite circles, and as a form of leisure. This way of seeing the world, and this brand of philanthropy, has become institutionalized, and taken for granted as good, despite the ways that it disproportionately benefits the ultra-wealthy, and neutralizes deeper issues of social and environmental inequality.

the more heroic it sounds to “give back.” It’s what I would call “conscience laundering”—feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity. But this just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place. The rich sleep better at night, while others get just enough to keep the pot from boiling over.… I’m really not calling for an end to capitalism; I’m calling for humanism.… Money should be spent trying out concepts that shatter current structures and systems that have turned much of the world into one vast market. Is progress really Wi-Fi on every street corner? No. It’s when no 13-year-old girl on the planet gets sold for sex.

there is a growing consensus among cognitive scientists that people with higher economic status are less empathetic than others.

Furthermore, one such study found that wealth can also inflate the wealthy person’s self-perception of how empathetic they are, “suggesting that those higher in status may not realize that they are actually lower in empathy.”5 One explanation for this phenomenon is that high-status people tend to be laser-focused on their own goals and desires, which blinds them from registering the concerns of those from lower socioeconomic groups.

These are fair questions, and at the same time revealed that the ultra-wealthy are, consciously or subconsciously, aware of the stigma they bear. Importantly, I found that this stigma creates a pervasive sense of anxiety among the ultra-wealthy about the extent to which they are viewed as deserving, virtuous, and authentic people.

by using their great wealth to transform themselves. This transformation is both internal and external. Wealth is used as a tool both to regenerate oneself by cultivating a lifestyle that leads to self-fulfillment and happiness and to facilitate greater social recognition from the nonwealthy, thereby gaining acceptance as authentic members of the community. Two birds, one stone.

In the fourth and current stage, finding self-fulfillment via affluent consumption is no longer seen as tragic or empty. Conspicuous consumption is viewed as a legitimate path to individual happiness. This view of wealth bridges the moral gap between those at the top and those at the bottom of the economic pyramid. They are separated not by purpose or goal, but only by how much money they have to consume. In other words, the nonwealthy are actually striving for the same outcomes as the wealthy, but simply have less to work with on their path to happiness.

In some cases, the physicality of working-poor jobs supercharges this perception of simplicity and respectability, especially compared with the complex and immaterial ways that some ultra-wealthy individuals make their money.

Thus, the second way the ultra-wealthy seek to attain normalcy, which goes hand in hand with making friends in low places, is to disguise their wealth by curating a personal appearance centered on rural Western working-class attire, which distances them from the stigmas associated with having money and reduces the social and symbolic distance between themselves and the rest of the community.

First, the ultra-wealthy do believe (like most Americans) that greed and elite affluence is morally precarious, and they vaguely perceive that they are judged and ethically rebuked by the rest of society. But, despite these vague perceptions, they were largely unaware or numb to the true intensity of these criticisms, and the extent to which these criticisms were present in their own community.

Yet, when it comes to the deep, personal, and localized criticism that is brewing in Teton County, the ultra-wealthy are mostly numb.

the immediacy of their day-to-day struggle, and the razor-thin margins they face, combined with lack of time for education or engagement, radically shapes their experiences with the ultra-wealthy, and renders them more positive than others we will encounter next chapter.

For the many who struggle so mightily, it is no fault of their own that they simply do not have the time or energy or access to education about the false truths and entrenched cultural scripts that directly equate hard work with affluence.

Teton County itself boasts a very high rate of residents with a bachelor’s degree or higher, at nearly 50 percent. Among the Latin American community in Teton County, only 43 percent have a middle school degree, 27 percent a high school degree, and 8 percent a college degree.

One recent study that included interviews with local property managers in Teton County reported implicit and explicit discrimination during the search for tenants and the signing of leases. For example, nearly all rental advertisements are offered in English only, and just 20 percent of market-rate rental managers offer leases available in English and Spanish, making it difficult for Spanish-speaking residents to know exactly what they are signing.17 This is of course just one example, albeit critically important given the scarcity of affordable housing in the area, and evidence of the power-differential between property managers and those at the whim of the market who may be taken advantage of because of their ethnicity or language proficiency.

This ideology extends itself to perhaps the greatest challenge for the environmental movement in the United States: the underlying cultural, racial, and economic elitism of environmentalism that often consciously and blatantly associates clean environments with whiter and wealthier people.

“every level I had a homeless student … just picture parent-teacher conferences. One couple walks in with stilettos and Armani, and the next family walks in with no clothes.”

“the people who are super wealthy, I would love it if they would share more and really help those who don’t have.” Undergirding her view is a moral and religious idea that we all deserve to have enough to live with dignity. Wealth doesn’t belong to individuals; it belongs to humanity itself. “Wealthy people do not deserve the money they have because the wealth of the world is for everyone, and we all deserve it.”

at the end of the day the one thing that I don’t see progressive politics doing is ever giving up anything of its own, ceding power or ceding resources or wealth, and at the end of the day that’s what has to happen if you want to have social justice.”

You know, the wealthy do give and support a lot of nonprofits that are doing good work … a lot of it is funding from philanthropists. I think that is very positive. The shadow side of that is that the donors have influence over what gets done, and so you see a lot of charity but very little justice. It’s really easy to give money to charity, and to ‘oh this person can’t pay rent this month so we’re going to give them a check this month,’ but you don’t see philanthropists giving money to systems-changing work, and trying to create a system where you don’t need to do charity.

The hope, according to María Guadalupe Flores, and the many others from this chapter, is that exposing people to the reality of life beneath the veneer is the only avenue through which those at rarefied heights can actually achieve the authentic community they so desire, and genuinely begin to “see the workers as human beings, as people, as friends.”

Ironically, my research shows that the extreme concentration of wealth creates problems with its left hand that it then attempts to solve with its right.

in the same way, mustering up empathy to see and feel the experiences of those struggling in the shadow of your superabundance will ring hollow if it does not lead to actively doing less harm—both locally and globally—to the people you proudly call friends, the community you proudly call home, and the natural environment that you proudly revere.