This book was written by Robert Frank, a reporter at the the Wall Street Journal who maintains a regular column called "The Wealth Report" which focuses primarily on issues affecting the rich. The story follows the lives of a number of wealthy families and couples from whom which Frank interviewed and developed a relationship with and then uses these narratives to draw more broad generalizations about the upper class. Because the word rich is subjective, Frank only interviewed families with a net worth of over 10,000,000$. The nice thing is that all of the people featured in the book are named and the information gleaned from them clearly did not come from a one shot interview. Its clear to see in the book that Frank had developed a long term relationship with them and this relationship gives you a much more textured picture into this world.
The main idea Frank explores in the book is how the lives of the rich are practically completely isolated from the rest of society. The separation is so severe that he comes up with a fictional name "Richistan" to describe these group of people. Within richistan, he makes up several classes of citizens. First up are the lower richistanis, households with net worths of 1-10,000,000$. These are are your white collar professionals or small business owners. They are like the illegal immigrants of Richistan because most richistani's don't consider them citizens and largely ignore them, referring to them not as rich but "merely affluent". Next up are the middle richistanis in the 10-100 million $ range, and then the upper class in the 100-1 billion $ range.
Within Richistan, everyone legitimately feels they are not rich because wealth scales so dramatically at the top. He gives many accounts such as one man who owned a mansion with 300 rooms, an on-call staff of 80 servants, and a backyard private golf course lamenting on what he could do if he just had enough money. There are lots of other neat tidbits of info like the boom of the personal butler industry; the charity spending and political activism of the rich; the emotional support clubs rich people create for each other; and how the rich are internally divided/fractured and not the monolithic "99% vs 1%" that Occupy Wall Street makes them out to be.
The nicest thing about this book was that its written in a casual narrative style following the lives of various Richistanis but their stories are used as microcosms for how all or Richistan operates. I enjoyed the book a lot for its easy style and how it didn't get bogged down in a ton of statistics or high horse moral bashing. I'd recommend it for everyone who enjoys reading about how people get mega wealthy and that upper class sphere in general.
This book was published right at the height of the financial crisis when nobody was really sure what was going on and how big of a loss in wealth would follow in the next year. Because all the research and interviews were done before the crash, it doesn't factor a ton in the book. Frank released a follow up book a few years later, called the "High Beta Rich" where he revisited the households he interviewed for this book and wrote about how they had fared due to the crash. The theme behind that book is that due to the securitization of our markets, it is now easier than ever to amass a fortune in record time (i.e. Mark Zuckerberg) but it is also easier than ever to lose that wealth for the same reason. It is a great read as well and I'll be posting another book review of it in a couple days.
http://www.amazon.com/Richistan-Journey-...0307341453
The main idea Frank explores in the book is how the lives of the rich are practically completely isolated from the rest of society. The separation is so severe that he comes up with a fictional name "Richistan" to describe these group of people. Within richistan, he makes up several classes of citizens. First up are the lower richistanis, households with net worths of 1-10,000,000$. These are are your white collar professionals or small business owners. They are like the illegal immigrants of Richistan because most richistani's don't consider them citizens and largely ignore them, referring to them not as rich but "merely affluent". Next up are the middle richistanis in the 10-100 million $ range, and then the upper class in the 100-1 billion $ range.
Within Richistan, everyone legitimately feels they are not rich because wealth scales so dramatically at the top. He gives many accounts such as one man who owned a mansion with 300 rooms, an on-call staff of 80 servants, and a backyard private golf course lamenting on what he could do if he just had enough money. There are lots of other neat tidbits of info like the boom of the personal butler industry; the charity spending and political activism of the rich; the emotional support clubs rich people create for each other; and how the rich are internally divided/fractured and not the monolithic "99% vs 1%" that Occupy Wall Street makes them out to be.
The nicest thing about this book was that its written in a casual narrative style following the lives of various Richistanis but their stories are used as microcosms for how all or Richistan operates. I enjoyed the book a lot for its easy style and how it didn't get bogged down in a ton of statistics or high horse moral bashing. I'd recommend it for everyone who enjoys reading about how people get mega wealthy and that upper class sphere in general.
This book was published right at the height of the financial crisis when nobody was really sure what was going on and how big of a loss in wealth would follow in the next year. Because all the research and interviews were done before the crash, it doesn't factor a ton in the book. Frank released a follow up book a few years later, called the "High Beta Rich" where he revisited the households he interviewed for this book and wrote about how they had fared due to the crash. The theme behind that book is that due to the securitization of our markets, it is now easier than ever to amass a fortune in record time (i.e. Mark Zuckerberg) but it is also easier than ever to lose that wealth for the same reason. It is a great read as well and I'll be posting another book review of it in a couple days.
http://www.amazon.com/Richistan-Journey-...0307341453
