KEY POINTS:
Money talks. It doesn't shut up. A new book, Richistan, by Robert Frank, is concerned with the super-rich. From the excerpts I've read, it's taken the argument on from F. Scott Fitzgerald's quote, "The rich are different, and decided "The super-rich are super-different."
Ralph Lauren-clad butterflies fluttering around a rarefied world of tax breaks, jets, mansions, yachts and 13-year-olds driving Ferraris. Sound like fun? If you say so.
Strangely, I've never felt jealous of the super-rich. Maybe it's because I don't like their stuff. I've been on yachts, and however expensive they are, they're still reminiscent of floating caravans. Same goes for helicopters - not even Donald Trump can avoid looking ridiculous getting off one. But these toys aren't aimed at me, they're for the squillionaires, the big kids in the global playground. You and me, were just there to get sand kicked in our faces.
Besides, money isn't always good news. In Richistan, Frank writes about the gormless children of the super-rich. So glutted on the mega-success of mater and pater, they have to attend courses to teach them self-belief and autonomy, or how to breathe unaided by the time they're 15: in, out ...
We've all met them. By 20, they're telling you about their ex-addictions. I once went to the house of such a girl - her parents had given her a posh flat and so much inner contentment she had 300 chocolate bars under her bed, and champagne and laxatives piled high in the fridge. Her three bathrooms smelled of vomit and air-freshener.
Still, money can be illuminating, sometimes scarily so - a torch flash on to the soul. In my years interviewing celebrities, one of my favourite questions was: "What is money good for?" Sometimes I asked because I really wanted to know. Sometimes because I liked to see them wriggle. Celebrities, just like everyone else, would rather have pins stuck into their eyeballs than discuss hard cash. In some instances, the colour would drain from their faces as though I had just asked them if they enjoyed sex with farm animals. And, if were all a bit like this (secretive and stingy; pathetically protective of our pile), the super-rich seem to be super like this.
All of which could explain the new breed of super-rich known as the Yawns (Young, Wealthy and Normal), who pretend theyre not rich. Whereas most people's super-rich photofit would be someone like Jemima Khan, racing through her starry existence like a princess in a Forbes list fairytale, the aptly named Yawns prefer to make money quietly, give to charity and worship their patron saint, Bill Gates - a trailblazer in making super-wealth resemble a car-boot sale. All of which is commendable. And bloody dull.
It makes one nostalgic for Yuppies, who at least were fun, with their gigantic phones, raging blood pressure and comedy cuff links. Before they succumbed to early-onset heart attacks, or hanged themselves in the early-90s, they had a loadsamoney blast. By comparison, Yawns seem slightly creepy: all that striving for faux-normality. Although there is something noble about lottery winners who refuse to give up their lives (cleaning jobs, factory work) when they win, it's not the same when Yawns refuse to give up their lifelessness.
In the end though, does anybody do money right? The poor have too little, the rich have too much and the super-rich have even more, but it appears we've all gone a bit crazy. There have even been reports in Britain of a middle-class crime wave. The bitter, overtaxed denizens of the suburbs are getting their own back by nicking paperclips from work, fibbing on insurance claims, and paying their cleaners cash in hand. I'll have to start writing articles on how to fiddle the electricity meter.
Other than that, increasingly, it seems, the haves and have-nots, the rich, the poor and inbetweens, are becoming equally weird. And weirdly equal. Maybe today the problem is not so much that the rich are different. Rather that where the grubbiness of filthy lucre is concerned, they are no longer different enough.
- Observer
