[.ca] Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom ... (ISBN 0307341453)

Lifestyles, Spending, Fears, and Anxiety of the New Rich:
If you enjoy intimate looks at private lives, Richistan will entertain you. If you want to learn how to improve your own life, Richistan will only frustrate you . . . by raising your sensitivities to the material things you don't have. The book has many key lessons for the new rich: 1. If you want to be rich today, you'd better be someone who starts a successful business that can be sold for big bucks. Inheriting money is a loser's game. 2. Once you are rich, you'll be left feeling poor . . . because others have so much more. You'll lust for a way to instantly double your money. 3. You won't be able to hire the quality of help you need to get rid of daily frustrations. The help you hire will, however, charge you an arm and a leg and will complicate your life. 4. Unless you work hard to insulate them from your wealth, your children will simply be clueless about how to run their lives in any meaningful way. You, too, could be the parent of a rich parasite with a drinking or drug problem. 5. Unless you cash out, your sense of being wealthy can lead you to spend money that you can't afford to spend. A financial disaster could follow. 6. In the race to prove you count, buying things doesn't work very well. The scale of what's expected is rapidly ratcheting up . . . as are the costs. Many times, more is less in terms of satisfaction. 7. Turn your money toward self-directed philanthropy or changing the political environment, and a few million bucks can have a huge impact. 8. Your spending will reach obscene levels. Does any family really need $80,000 a year in massages? 9. You'll only feel comfortable with people with the same wealth you have. Those with less will see you as a mark. Those with more will put you down and make you feel poor. The book also suggests (but doesn't really develop) the point that there's a split between the very rich and the merely rich, in terms of attitudes and lifestyle. The merely rich are the local professionals who vote Republican (the ones the best selling how to books emphasize) and want to belong at the country club. The really rich are entrepreneurs, and they think the whole system (whatever system it is) stinks. They plan to replace or improve on what the merely rich like (think Donald Trump). The best parts, to me, were those where a person or a married couple were profiled. I was particularly interested in the story of Philip Berber, the Jewish Irishman, who is reshaping third-world philanthropy by nudging aside the NGOs in Ethiopia to let the people help themselves through his personal charity, Glimmer of Hope. His story begins on page 157. The book is a very easy read, and it goes down like a good ice cream soda. Everyone will end up feeling superior to most of the people in the book. What more can you expect from buying and reading a book?