The Lives Of The Super Wealthy - The secret fears of the super rich, on money, anxiety & isolation

[BridgeTheGap]

NPR - "On Point" w/ Tom Ashbrook program from today. Audio re-broadcast is not up at site yet, but a lively discussion is taking place already. I listened to a bit of the program and it was very interesting.
+++++++++++

It’s the new Gilded Age in America — we all know it.

A hundred-thousand-plus households with fortunes of $25 million or more. Often much, much more, into billions. What’s it like to live with all that dough?

A big new survey gives some surprising answers. Yes, the rich and super-rich have sweet freedom from crushing concerns about jobs and making ends meet. But many still worry – obsess – about money. And about alienation, isolation, purpose in life… when they don’t have to do anything.

This hour On Point: the real lives and fears of the rich and super-rich in America.

http://onpoint.wbur.org/2011/03/30/super-wealthy

[closeupready]

1. This may sound insane, but $25 million is rich, but not super-rich, IMO.

Super-rich is hundreds of millions. does that make sense?

[EOTE]

3. Do you have your dictionary definition of super-rich handy?

Because it's all rather subjective. With 25 million dollars, you can never work a day in the remainder of your life, but you, and your entire family, could live EXTREMELY well merely off of 4% interest. To me, that qualifies as super rich.

[closeupready]

7. Several years back, I believe I read that Ultra-High Net Worth (UHNW) people

were targeted by financial service entities, starting at $100M. Obviously, that would have gone up.

[AndyTiedye]

12. You Need a Billion to be Super Rich These Days

To have the kind of power that we attribute to the "super-rich" you need to be able to acquire companies.

$25 million will buy a very comfortable lifestyle, I'm sure, but it won't buy you power.
Billionaires have power.

[themadstork]

17. Yeah. Overlord-style power requires small nation-type wealth. nt

[EOTE]

18. So that's the dictionary definition?

So you're only super-rich when you can afford to buy off the bulk of congress as well as having more money than any one person could spend in their lifetimes? Methinks that everyone creates their own definition of such a term.

[EOTE]

19. So you need to be able to buy out congress to be super rich?

Is that where the line from rich to super rich is drawn? Is there another line drawn between super rich and hyper rich?

[WinkyDink]

22. To you. Not to an oligarch.

[EOTE]

25. That's what I'm saying.

Everyone has their own definition of "super-rich", so it's pretty silly arguing over where, exactly, super-rich begins.

[LongTomH]

33. You could use the definition from Ajay Kapur

Ajay Kapur is the analyst for Citigroup who wrote a series of articles in 2005 defining the concept of Plutonomy. Kapur defines a plutonomy as an economy ran for and supported by the consumption of the: very rich (upper 1 % of the population), extremely rich (upper 0.1%) and the “mega-rich” (upper 0.01%). Mere millionaires? They’re poor white trash!

According to him:

"The top 1% of households in the U.S., (about 1 million households) accounted for about 20% of overall U.S. income in 2000, slightly smaller than the share of income of the bottom 60% of households put together. That's about 1 million households compared with 60 million households, both with similar slices of the income pie! Clearly, the analysis of the top 1% of U.S. households is paramount. The usual analysis of the "average" U.S. consumer is flawed from the start. To continue with the U.S., the top 1% of households also account for 33% of net worth, greater than the bottom 90% of households put together. It gets better (or worse, depending on your political stripe) - the top 1% of households account for 40% of financial net worth, more than the bottom 95% of households put together."

This was written in 2005; the figures for the concentration of wealth are even more obscenely unequal now!

Kapur and others were putting forth the idea that spending by the uber-rich would be enough to drive the economy; the corollary of this was that spending by the middle class no longer mattered! In a plutonomy, there is no such thing as an average consumer; there is only the very rich and the rest of us.

[pscot]

8. That's a quibble over definitions

Anyone with a net worth 20X my lifetime earnings looks super rich from where I stand.

[EOTE]

20. Tell me about it.

Seems rather silly to me.

[OHdem10]

2. Oh they worry about alienation, as some Posh Norwegian

Cruise Line is not changing in order to keep the Elites
from having to associate with the great unwashed.
Yep,they have their own private areas with the most posh
of services and never have to cross paths with the Middle
Class on the same cruise. Back to the gilded age for sure.

And they worry about Alienation????give me a break.

[freshwest]

4. The article seems backwards. They worry about losing that isolation and dealing with us.

[Johonny]

24. IDK

I think the rich tend to get surrounded by yes men, enablers, etc... There is a tendency to be isolated socially and information wise as these people try to cut you off more and more. It is easiest to see in the many celebrity crashes, but I think it happens in a lot of the rich.

[freshwest]

5. NPR is pandering to the foundations that fund them, again.

:puke:

[themadstork]

6. This was also an article in the Atlantic.

And really a pretty good one. Not all rich people are sociopathic autocrats. They have their own array of pains, anxieties. My fiancé is wealthy, and I guess she really struggled about when exactly to divulge that fact to me, as she's been burnt by guys she thought loved her before. Now she is gravely ill due to a viral infection of the heart. Her brother died last year after spending several months in a coma (age 19). Her family will never have to worry about paying the bills, but I'm not sure what kind of solace that is to two parents who now stand a very real chance of outlivIng both their children.

[lumberjack_jeff]

9. I hope your fiancee gets well soon.

Best wishes.

[themadstork]

16. Thank you.

We're hoping to avoid transplant. . . Sometimes I really don't get why certain things happen.

[Kievan Rus]

10. Many rich and materialistic people sell their souls to be rich in the first place

[BridgeTheGap]

11. Warren Buffett seems to be hip as to what is taking place

And this quote is from 2006, BEFORE the meld-down.

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26every.html

[Thunderstruck]

15. And this is from a guy who disowned his adopted grand-daughter for appearing

in a documentary produced by an heir of Johnson & Johnson...

"...Nicole agreed to appear in The One Percent, a documentary by Johnson & Johnson heir Jamie Johnson about the gap between rich and poor in America. "I've been very blessed to have my education taken care of, and I have had my living expenses taken care of while I'm in school," she states on camera. None of the Buffetts, a famously press-averse bunch, had ever before appeared in so public a forum to dish about their upbringing. Though Nicole informed her father of her role in the film and he had no objections, she failed to give her grandfather a heads-up. Asked in the film how he'd react to her interview, Nicole responds, "I definitely fear judgment. Money is the spoke in my grandfather's wheel of life."

Nicole concedes that the remarks may have sounded brusque. "I meant that my grandfather is like a Formula One driver who only wants to race — he just loves the game and wants to be the best," she says. But Buffett was galled. He had for some time felt ambivalent about Nicole and her sister's claim to his fortune — though Peter had legally adopted them, he divorced their mother in 1993 and remarried three years later. To make matters worse, while plugging the film on Oprah, Nicole confessed, "It would be nice to be involved with creating things for others with that money and to be involved in it. I feel completely excluded from it."

The perceived sense of entitlement and Nicole's self-appointed role as family spokesperson prompted Buffett to tell Peter that he'd renounce her. A month later, the mega-billionaire mailed Nicole a letter in which he cautioned her about the pitfalls of the Buffett name: "People will react to you based on that 'fact' rather than who you are or what you have accomplished." He punctuated the letter by declaring, "I have not emotionally or legally adopted you as a grandchild, nor have the rest of my family adopted you as a niece or a cousin." Nicole was devastated. "He signed the letter 'Warren,'" she says. "I have a card from him just a year earlier that's signed 'Grandpa.'"

...more at link...

http://www.marieclaire.com/world-reports/news/latest/warren-buffett-granddaughter-nicole-buffett

Real nice, Grandpa...

[Blue_Tires]

27. wow...holy damn....

[BridgeTheGap]

29. I'm not surprised. Buffett is protecting the family name and blood ties run deep.

I know people of far less means who treat their adopted children differently than their own off-spring. Of course, they don't see it. I posted the quote just to demonstrate that there are wealthy people who know the score and aren't affraid to point it out. I do think class war is going on and, unfortunately, there isn't nearly enough class consciousness among working people to suit me.

[sadbear]

13. Fuck'em all.

All they deserve is scorn and the negative emotions they "worry about".

[Initech]

23. Until they start paying their share, I agree, fuck 'em all.

[BlueIris]

14. I just read the Atlantic article about the study.

I thought the author did a good job of not pandering to the rich, and gave a balanced review. I've been thinking about it all week.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the overwhelming concern expressed by all the study's respondants was for their children (not wanting them to wind up being trust fund brats.) The author actually wrote that many don't want their kids "to grow up to be 'creeps.'"

Other fears included the idea they would never be taken seriously in their careers, would take too long to find success, (if you have money, who needs ambition?) or would never be thought of as valuable to their partners other than being a status symbol or way of acruing material security.

[WinkyDink]

21. Two words. Guess which ones.

[freshwest]

26. I know those words. They both have only one syllable.

[Fire Walk With Me]

28. Classic Bizarro cartoon...

"Suffering of the rich". Three rich folks wail and gnash teeth, throwing their hands into the air:

"We're out of caviar! The Rolls is out of gas! Will it never END!?"

[white_wolf]

30. Just the name of this article pisses me off.

When people are starving, homeless, out of work, or in any other form of poverty, and I hear the rich worrying about alienation, isolation, and purpose in life I just have one thing to say to them: Fuck you! You deserve whatever misery comes to you, the vast majority of you have never had to work and none of your children or grandchildren will so I have no sympathy.

[eppur_se_muova]

31. "Richistan" is an interesting read ...

one of the things I took away from reading it was that changes in global finance mean that now even billionaires can lose everything overnight -- it's almost as if there's no such thing as a "safe" amount of money anymore. Membership in the very rich has become more fluid, with newly rich popping up out of nowhere, and newly ruined going back there.

(Of course, if you don't have money in things like derivatives, you *can* keep your money fairly safe. But some people just don't want to get out of the game.)

[groovedaddy]

35. That's one of the big problems with stimulating the economy now - the rich are scared to invest, as

they don't know who they can trust. Not that I feel sorry for them at all.

[rucky]

32. Maybe they just need a hug & they'll stop waging class warfare on us?

Hug a millionare!

[BridgeTheGap]

34. And pick their pocket while you're at it! They've certainly picked us clean! n.t

[L0oniX]

36. Message to the rich ..."FUCK YOU".

[BridgeTheGap]

37. They're already doing us...have been for awhile now. We are such a complacent working class. n.t

[blueamy66]

38. Cry me a fucking river.

Try staying awake at night worrying about how you are going to make your house payment you privileged, whining pieces of shit.

Need a purpose in life....go feed the homeless....pay some hospital bills for the poor - shit, just visit some people in the hospital.

[BridgeTheGap]

39. Amen! n.t