BOOKS - `Richistan' turns out to be a not-so-interesting place - Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich By Robert Frank Crown, $24.95, 288 pages
F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed that "The very rich are different from you and me." On the evidence of this book, however, that is not true.
Actually, the new rich -- the hedge fund managers, Wall Street financiers, dot-com entrepreneurs and oil barons -- are disappointingly similar.
They crave bigger houses than their neighbors, as well as faster cars, longer yachts and nicer watches. They can be careless with money, getting into debt and not only making billions but also losing them again.
A lot of them envy what other, richer, people have and work diligently to catch up. Fewer than half of them believe money has made them happier.
So, not much difference there. Robert Frank, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal who writes a column and a blog about wealthy Americans, has trawled diligently across country estates, golf courses and yacht marinas to find out what makes the new rich tick.
But all that he uncovers is the banality of wealth: Divide the money by 10, 100 or 1,000 and there stands Everyman.
As Frank observes, this is the raw face of newly acquired wealth, before those who have it have gotten into the right clubs, created their own foundations and learned to talk in a hush about what they own. In places such as Greenwich, Conn., the hedge fund capital of the East Coast, the fight between old and new money plays out again.
Financiers and "instapreneurs" -- entrepreneurs who suddenly find that they are enormously wealthy -- are still frowned upon by the establishment. Wall Street figures such as Steve Cohen, who Frank estimates has spent $700 million on art, find it harder to acquire social cachet.
This is a well-timed inquiry because the United States is in the middle of what Frank calls the "third wave" of wealth generation, after the Gilded Age of the late 19th century and the Roaring '20s. The latest wave is creating mind-boggling personal wealth with pedestrian regularity; billionaires are minted with every surge in the U.S. stock market. There were 14 billionaires in the U.S. in 1985; there are more than 1,000 and rising now.
This phenomenon is going on elsewhere in the world too: The commodity and energy boom has made billionaires and multimillionaires out of lots of people in Latin America and the Middle East, and the rise of China and India is contributing more.
But the U.S. has a particularly touchy relationship with wealth.
