“Right this way, Mister Warbucks.”
Welcome to Richistan, USA
The American Dream of riches for all is turning into a nightmare of inequality. But a backlash is brewing, reports Paul Harris in New York
Paul Harris in New York
Sunday July 22, 2007
Observer
On the surface, Mark Cain works for a time-share company. Members pay a one-off sum to join and an annual fee. They then get to book holiday time in various destinations around the globe.
But Solstice clients are not ordinary people. They are America’s super-rich and a brief glance at its operations reveal the vast and still widening gulf between them and the rest of America.
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Solstice has only about 80 members. Platinum membership costs them $875,000 to join and then a $42,000 annual fee. In return they get access to 10 homes from London to California and a private yacht in the Caribbean, all fully staffed with cooks, cleaners and ‘lifestyle managers’ ready to satisfy any whim from helicopter-skiing to audiences with local celebrities. As the firm’s marketing manager, Cain knows what Solstice’s clientele want. ‘We are trying to feed and manage this insatiable appetite for luxury,’ Cain said with pride.
America’s super-rich have returned to the days of the Roaring Twenties. As the rest of the country struggles to get by, a huge bubble of multi-millionaires lives almost in a parallel world. The rich now live in their own world of private education, private health care and gated mansions. They have their own schools and their own banks. They even travel apart - creating a booming industry of private jets and yachts. Their world now has a name, thanks to a new book by Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Frank which has dubbed it ‘Richistan’. There every dream can come true. But for the American Dream itself - which promises everyone can join the elite - the emergence of Richistan is a mixed blessing. ‘We in America are heading towards ‘developing nation’ levels of inequality. We would become like Brazil. What does that say about us? What does that say about America?’ Frank said.
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How the other 1 per cent lives
According to Robert Frank’s Richistan, America’s super-rich earn more than Canada, says Tim Adams
Sunday July 22, 2007
The Observer
Richistan by Robert Frank
Buy Richistan at the Guardian bookshop
Richistan: A Journey Through the 21st Century Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich
by Robert Frank
Piatkus £12.99, pp263
For four years Robert Frank has held a curious position on the Wall Street Journal. On the in-house publication of the American money markets Frank is the lifestyle correspondent; his job has been to report on the spending habits of America’s New Rich, the top 1 per cent of earners in the wealthiest nation the planet has ever known.
By 2004 this elite was taking home $1.35 trillion a year, a figure in excess of the take-home pay of the whole of France, Italy or Canada. But these people had not just been getting richer during the Bush years, Frank argued, they had been creating for themselves a separate country, a state within a state closed to those with a net worth under $10m. Frank calls this country Richistan. He set out to explore this distant land for his paper in the way that a foreign correspondent might have done, sending back the news from the front. This book is his collected dispatches.