贺岁宣传片四千金:The Rise of the New Global Elite - Atlantic Mobile

The Rise of the New Global Elite

Image credit: Stephen Webster/Wonderful Machine

If you happened tobe watching NBC on the first Sunday morning in August last summer, youwould have seen something curious. There, on the set of Meet the Press,the host, David Gregory, was interviewing a guest who made a forcefulcase that the U.S. economy had become “very distorted.” In the wake ofthe recession, this guest explained, high-income individuals, largebanks, and major corporations had experienced a “significant recovery”;the rest of the economy, by contrast—including small businesses and “avery significant amount of the labor force”—was stuck and stillstruggling. What we were seeing, he argued, was not a single economy atall, but rather “fundamentally two separate types of economy,”increasingly distinct and divergent.

This diagnosis, though alarming, was hardly unique: drawing attentionto the divide between the wealthy and everyone else has long beenstandard fare on the left. (The idea of “two Americas” was a centraltheme of John Edwards’s 2004 and 2008 presidential runs.) What made theargument striking in this instance was that it was being offered by noneother than the former five-term Federal Reserve Chairman AlanGreenspan: iconic libertarian, preeminent defender of the free market,and (at least until recently) the nation’s foremost devotee of Ayn Rand.When the high priest of capitalism himself is declaring the growth ineconomic inequality a national crisis, something has gone very, verywrong.

This widening gap between the rich and non-rich has been evident foryears. In a 2005 report to investors, for instance, three analysts atCitigroup advised that “the World is dividing into two blocs—thePlutonomy and the rest”:

In a plutonomy there is no such animal as “the U.S. consumer” or “the UKconsumer”, or indeed the “Russian consumer”. There are rich consumers,few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income andconsumption they take. There are the rest, the “non-rich”, themultitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites ofthe national pie.

Before the recession, it was relatively easy to ignore thisconcentration of wealth among an elite few. The wondrous inventions ofthe modern economy—Google, Amazon, the iPhone—broadly improved the livesof middle-class consumers, even as they made a tiny subset ofentrepreneurs hugely wealthy. And the less-wondrousinventions—particularly the explosion of subprime credit—helped mask therise of income inequality for many of those whose earnings werestagnant.

But the financial crisis and its long, dismal aftermath have changedall that. A multibillion-dollar bailout and Wall Street’s swift,subsequent reinstatement of gargantuan bonuses have inspired a narrativeof parasitic bankers and other elites rigging the game for their ownbenefit. And this, in turn, has led to wider—and not unreasonable—fearsthat we are living in not merely a plutonomy, but a plutocracy, in whichthe rich display outsize political influence, narrowly self-interestedmotives, and a casual indifference to anyone outside their own rarefiedeconomic bubble.

Through my work as a business journalist, I’ve spent the better partof the past decade shadowing the new super-rich: attending the sameexclusive conferences in Europe; conducting interviews over cappuccinoson Martha’s Vineyard or in Silicon Valley meeting rooms; observinghigh-powered dinner parties in Manhattan. Some of what I’ve learned isentirely predictable: the rich are, as F. Scott Fitzgerald famouslynoted, different from you and me.

What is more relevant to our times, though, is that the rich of todayare also different from the rich of yesterday. Our light-speed,globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite thatconsists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth.Its members are hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocratswho feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economiccompetition—and many of them, as a result, have an ambivalent attitudetoward those of us who didn’t succeed so spectacularly. Perhaps mostnoteworthy, they are becoming a transglobal community of peers who havemore in common with one another than with their countrymen back home.Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong,Moscow or Mumbai, today’s super-rich are increasingly a nation untothemselves.