“Generation Wealth” by Lauren Greenfield
Generation Wealth is a documentary film by Lauren Greenfield that tells about the desire to consume that has no limit. Lauren Greenfield is a photographer and filmmaker who had produced a photographic monograph and photo exhibition in 2017 under the same title with this documentary film. This documentary film was released in 2018.
Generation Wealth can perfectly describe the tagline of this film “The American dream just keeps getting more expensive”. Lauren Greenfield told NBC news, that she sees luxury and affluence is much more dominant in our media and it makes people desire those things. Nowadays, people no longer compare their own property with their neighbors, but with celebrities and other wealthy public figures that they know from TV or film.
The wish to be rich and famous frequently causes depression and anxiety in our society. Greenfield realizes that our society has loosed values of hard work and frugality that has been inherited by the previous generation, but now turns to blink celebrities and narcissism culture.
“The bags start $20.000 and go up”
In Generation Wealth, Lauren Greenfield investigates obsession to be wealthy and its toxic effect. She began to make an interview with her school friends in Los Angeles about their American dream and the efforts to achieve it. She then continues her investigation across America, Moscow, Dubai, and China, which shows how people from across the world are striving to be rich. This documentary film contains some footage interviews with various subjects from her family members, top manager, little star, celebrity, billionaire, banker to a porn star. Greenfield also follows their activities and portrays how they praise luxury properties, cars, and accessories.
This film is not about being rich itself, but rather on an endless desire to be rich. In the global political-economy context, the desire to accumulate wealth give a significant impact on wealth inequality. Thomas Piketty in TED2014, explains that the dynastic motive for wealth accumulation has contributed to wealth inequality. If people were accumulating wealth only to fulfill their needs in old ages, it will not really affect the level of wealth inequality. However, now, the wealth accumulation is not only based on pure life cycle reason. There are new stories of wealth accumulation, for example, they want to inherit their property to their children/ grandchildren, to get prestige and power from the wealth. These new stories drive so much more wealth inequality that we faced today.
According to Piketty, there is an interesting fact which is in the last decade, wealth inequality is still very large, although the quantity of wealth relative to income has recovered from World War I, II, and the Great Depression. The more equal organization is needed to regulate the wealth dynamics, for example through global coordination on wealth taxation and implementation of progressive tax rates based on reliable wealth statistics.
Piketty told Financial Times, in his book “Capital and Ideology” (2019), he emphasizes that the changing of ideology and political mobilization will give impact on wealth inequality in a society. The more equal structure on the organization of property relations is required to decrease wealth inequality.
A fairer society, then, depends on whether we will continue the story of excessive wealth accumulation or play a newer story that leads to a fairer economic system?