Perspectives

BENEFIT SOCIETY

America has entered its second Gilded Age. How wide and deep goes the gilding, what it portends for democracy, the economy, the culture, philanthropy — all that is disputable. At the turn of last century’s Gilded Age, the rich generally were held in low regard. The perspective was always nuanced by the observer’s sense of his chances of becoming one of them, for example, or by his sense of how well he could resist the temptation of behaving like one of them or — by whatever good humor — he might face the fact that he would never become one of them. But nothing quite like Mark Twain’s hilarious novel The Gilded Age or Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, where the behavior of the wealthy is compared to that of savages, has been produced so far in the second Gilded Age, though a good try has just been published. Richistan, a journalistic work by The Wall Street Journal columnist Robert Frank, displays the grotesque disparity between the power widely imputed to great riches and the actual powers of the all-too-human creatures who own them. Frank, for example, deftly opens his book with a peek at an age-old perplexity of the American rich: the servant problem. Money just can’t buy reliable, socially presentable domestic help anymore. The upper middle classes find servants for child, house, and lawn care from among the wives and daughters of recent immigrants. But far grander skills are called for by the scale and complexity of the domestic arrangements of the new rich — houses in the five-figure square-foot range, usually scattered, one each, in city, suburb, oceanside, and mountain. Entrepreneurs have leaped to supply the demand. Frank introduces us to the Starkey Mansion in Denver, a boot camp for so-called “household managers” who can do everything from pouring wine at the dinner table and deploying Excel on the family’s budgets to arranging travel plans for the pilot of the family’s jet. But one critical element in the Starkey curriculum suggests that the pathos of the servant problem is unlikely to go away anytime soon. Starkey aims to teach its students the key value of “the service heart,” and yet career seekers today, even in a “service economy,” tend to repel implantation of anything like the heart of a servant. It seems far better (for their self-respect if not for their wallets) to serve large, impersonal corporations like McDonalds, Marriott, or Memorial Sloan- Kettering. Their reasoning seems off somehow — a servant is a servant — but this is America, where freedom often comes down to being able to sleep in one’s own home, however wretched, rather than in someone else’s, however luxurious. Meanwhile, back in the laps of luxury, a curious transformation seems to be taking place. Frank quotes the complaint of one richississimo that his household manager is running his home as efficiently, but also as heartlessly and expensively, as a small corporation. He once calculated that the woman deployed five people, underlings and vendors, to kill a mouse. Another comic disconnect that Frank explores is the one between purchasing power and happiness. That such a disconnect exists should be no surprise to anyone above the poverty line. Frank’s twist on the platitude, however, is to note that great wealth can promote unhappiness, not simply fail to buy it. Several of his specimen new rich suffer from what might be called Endless Possibility Disorder. Ed Bazinet was a king of kitsch, amassing a fortune through the sale of tiny, often snow-bound ceramic villages to collectors of the cute and twee. So long as he was obsessively occupied in designing these things, overseeing their manufacture, arranging for their marketing, and then, finally, selling out his company to a corporate kitsch purveyor, Bazinet was a reasonably happy man. Trouble came with the endless possibilities that opened to him when he attempted to enjoy his wealth. His New York apartment was the test case. He went wild designing it, but then hated what he’d wrought. The endless possibilities of creating a new apartment were still out there, in the city and in his bank account. But now, as he looked inward to his own powers and talents, Bazinet came up short and fled back home to the simple life (possibly a tiny, snow-bound village) in Minnesota. Bazinet was struck down by EPD. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the victims are self-made men, bored heiresses, dissolute playboys, “rich kids,” or lottery winners: freedom in the form of infinite possibility opens up before them, and they fly out like liberated parakeets. But then, lacking any sort of guiding taste, ethic, and principle or focused curiosity (except for moneymaking), they flutter here and there, never settling anywhere until they die or go back to a tiny village in Minnesota. Frank, being a journalist, is not in the business of giving advice to America’s new rich on how they should live the good life. Still, Frank does introduce us to some folks who use their money by some principle that was dormant under their frantic acts of moneymaking. Philip Berber, for example, made his pile by selling his software company in 2000 for roughly $488 million. With his philanthropic company Glimmer of Hope, capitalized at $100 million, the good he delivers directly (he establishes small, local NGOs wherever he does business) is water wells to Ethiopia’s rural poor. Still, in Frank’s profile of him, Berber has great fun at the expense of benefit parties, their pomposity, the tedium of the speeches, the awful social risks inherent in place-card seating — but above all, the waste of all that money that might otherwise have gone directly to benefit the ostensible objects of the charity. Reading Richistan, I am reminded of the perverse irony of addiction. Serious boozers eventually experience a vicious reversal of effects: instead of courage, fear; instead of wit, stupidity; instead of selective forgetfulness, blackout; instead of self-approval, self-hatred — at which point, of course, more drink seems an ideal palliative. Something of the sort appears to happen to serious moneymakers. Frank’s most delicious chapters illustrate the wealthy’s “buyer’s remorse”: the jet with the Ikea interior; the Damien Hirsch diamond-studded skull that began to stink; or the yacht, like Paul Allen’s, that is so big, it won’t fit into the romantic Bahia Mar harbor in Florida. Instead, it must nestle in among the container ships at Port Everglades. Of course, the more sought-after a luxury status marker becomes, the less it satisfies — at which point more buying seems an ideal palliative. Let me offer a prediction: No tragedy will emerge from our Gilded Age; no savage satire; nothing but “How I…” books, pluto-porn, and gentle humor. Why? Because in our time, most of us having become reasonably well off and sophisticated, there’s no real animus against the rich. We know them for what they tell Frank they are, again and again: ordinary, middleclass people. Our knowing the rich for what they are must be accounted a small triumph of democracy, even as the vast wealth gap between them and us assures the degradation of democracy.