From Shakespeare through to every lottery winner who has ever spent, spent, spent, the idea that wealth corrupts is a persistent one. In Does Money Make You Meaner? (BBC World Service), presenter Jack Stewart heads to Hollywood to unpick the science behind the cliche.
In LA (“where instant fortunes can be made”), Stewart talks to Professor Paul K Piff from the University of California, a veteran in the psychology of wealth. His findings are darkly comic (apparently the richer you are, the more likely you are to tick yes to the statement: “If I were on the Titanic, I would deserve to be on the first lifeboat”), suggesting a link between the 1% and the psychopathic self-regard of the world’s Patrick Batemans. In the end, the programme offers a disappointingly vague conclusion – essentially a shrug and a “maybe” – to the question posed so bluntly in the title; Piff’s findings, we are told, are contradicted by another professor.
Another problem lay in its setting: Hollywood feels rather quaint now. In 2015, an economically expanding Asian or African country might have been more appropriate. Some of the observations offered up as evidence felt similarly uninspired: a taxi driver, for example, tells us that sometimes wealthier people don’t tip. Well, duh.
Much more engaging from the off is Rotterdam: The Dutch Melting Pot (BBC World Service), a sensitive, exploratory episode of Heart and Soul that probed the racial tensions beneath the outwardly liberal surface of the Netherlands. Presenter Anna Holligan finds that despite Islamophobia (from street level to populist rightwing politicians such as Geert Wilders) and mosques being defaced, the underlying issue of second-generation, online radicalisation is being swept under the carpet. “You should help someone to de-radicalise – the problem is much bigger than your ego,” says rapper Appa. He is partly speaking in answer to the city’s Muslim mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb, who says young Muslims who refuse to integrate should “get the hell out” of the country. Exploring these cross-cultural issues (ideas of assimilation versus representative identity) often feels overly simplistic, but the programme acquits itself admirably and works as a cautionary, sadly universal tale.
