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"'A fascinating excursion through the lives of the rich. The rise and rise of rich people is the most important and least noticed economic trend of our time. Richistanis a lively glimpse of the future.' - Richard Koch 'jaw-dropping' - the Observer"
Product Description
In this riveting book, Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Frank explores the lives and lifestyles of a new breed of millionaires and billionaires - many of them self-made and from blue-collar backgrounds - and how this new gilded age is affecting wider society. Profiles of 'instapreneurs', dot-com billionaires, and eccentrics from the lower and upper reaches of Richistan take us into the rarified world of people like Ed Bazinet, who became a multi-millionaire by selling miniature ceramic villages, and Tim Blixseth, who earned billions by trading remote stretches of timberland. The influence wielded by the newly wealthy goes far beyond their earning power, and Frank also explores the lifestyles developing around them (butler schools and a new type of service employee, self-help groups for people worth $10 million or more) as well as where their money is going (the commodification of the art world, the rise of 'market-driven' philanthropy). As wealth creation becomes more and more globalised, Richistan looks behind the glitz to find the real story of new money and its impact on the world.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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?
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?
Format:Paperback
Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Frank has written a useful book on the new rich. He points to the huge gap between the rich and the rest of us. The richest 1% in the USA have 33% of the country's wealth, more than the poorest 90% and the incomes of the richest 10% are growing by more than 10% a year. Yet median incomes for US households have fallen for five years running and median families make $3000 a year less than they did in 2000.
How do the rich do this? The global pension, insurance and mutual funds have $46 trillion, wealth produced by the 95% who work. The CEOs, bankers and hedge-fund owners - the money managers - steal from this global river of cash.
Governments help the rich to rob us. Bush's tax cuts gave 80% of the tax savings to the richest 10%, 20% to the richest 0.1%.
The result? Our savings, housing and pension funds vanish, so David Blunkett tells us that we have to work till we drop. Education, health and industry vanish too.
But the rich get richer. In 2005, Hurricane Wilma wrecked Fort Lauderdale a month after Hurricane Katrina wrecked New Orleans - yet the town still held the 46th International Boat Show and shifted its funds from the newly homeless have-nots to the have-yachts.
When Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page bought themselves a Boeing 767 wide-body airliner, Page said that it would let them "take large numbers of people to places such as Africa. I think that can only be good for the world."
Frank shares this folly. He ends by writing, "If we accept that the rich aren't the cause of the current inequities, but merely the lucky beneficiaries, we can also hope that they will use their wealth to help target society's deepest problems."
He then refers to Andrew Carnegie's 100-year-old dream of `reconciliation between rich and poor, a reign of harmony'. Why hasn't this happened? Maybe it's because we think that `the rich aren't the cause of the current inequities', because we still hope that `they will use their wealth to help target society's deepest problems'.
How do the rich do this? The global pension, insurance and mutual funds have $46 trillion, wealth produced by the 95% who work. The CEOs, bankers and hedge-fund owners - the money managers - steal from this global river of cash.
Governments help the rich to rob us. Bush's tax cuts gave 80% of the tax savings to the richest 10%, 20% to the richest 0.1%.
The result? Our savings, housing and pension funds vanish, so David Blunkett tells us that we have to work till we drop. Education, health and industry vanish too.
But the rich get richer. In 2005, Hurricane Wilma wrecked Fort Lauderdale a month after Hurricane Katrina wrecked New Orleans - yet the town still held the 46th International Boat Show and shifted its funds from the newly homeless have-nots to the have-yachts.
When Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page bought themselves a Boeing 767 wide-body airliner, Page said that it would let them "take large numbers of people to places such as Africa. I think that can only be good for the world."
Frank shares this folly. He ends by writing, "If we accept that the rich aren't the cause of the current inequities, but merely the lucky beneficiaries, we can also hope that they will use their wealth to help target society's deepest problems."
He then refers to Andrew Carnegie's 100-year-old dream of `reconciliation between rich and poor, a reign of harmony'. Why hasn't this happened? Maybe it's because we think that `the rich aren't the cause of the current inequities', because we still hope that `they will use their wealth to help target society's deepest problems'.
Format:Paperback
I often read the author's WSJ's blog (The Wealth Report) and am a big fan, except I don't like the occasional tone of the blog: "How the Rich Are Different From You and Me..."-pedestrian/small-towny and assuming none of the readers are wealthy enough, - why?
To begin with the book's name is misleading: it has nothing to do with 5 Central Asian's Stans. It is an ironically wrong title as all those countries are very poor, with the exception of Kazakstan that has been showing good growth owing to the oil/gas/minerals (OK, technically Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are also well-endowned,but are a long way from prosperity). Also the book is exclusively about the U.S. - nothing international. I thought the book would be about the new international wealth judging by the cover.
The book doesn't give a 360 degree into the lives of the rich, but does give nevertheless excellent glimpses into the latest trends, divisions, whims, problems of the wealthy and the class divisions among them. The work is charting a new territory, is structuring and classifying the wealthy population property and is original in this way.
It also mentions atrocious social climbing, pretentiousness, competition at the top, the problems wealthy have shown with great candor, sence of humour and healthy, grounded and reasonable attitude. I liked the profiles of entrepreneurs whom the authour clearly knows well. A good, entertaining week-end easy read,with a lot of independent thinking on part of the author.
To begin with the book's name is misleading: it has nothing to do with 5 Central Asian's Stans. It is an ironically wrong title as all those countries are very poor, with the exception of Kazakstan that has been showing good growth owing to the oil/gas/minerals (OK, technically Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are also well-endowned,but are a long way from prosperity). Also the book is exclusively about the U.S. - nothing international. I thought the book would be about the new international wealth judging by the cover.
The book doesn't give a 360 degree into the lives of the rich, but does give nevertheless excellent glimpses into the latest trends, divisions, whims, problems of the wealthy and the class divisions among them. The work is charting a new territory, is structuring and classifying the wealthy population property and is original in this way.
It also mentions atrocious social climbing, pretentiousness, competition at the top, the problems wealthy have shown with great candor, sence of humour and healthy, grounded and reasonable attitude. I liked the profiles of entrepreneurs whom the authour clearly knows well. A good, entertaining week-end easy read,with a lot of independent thinking on part of the author.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Might have been a better magazine piece......
I agree with the previous reviewer in that this is like one long article about some rich people. I think this book would have made a better Vanity Fair article. Read more
Published on 29 Aug 2007 by BigHorn
an excellent read
For all aspirational people and wannabe successes, this is what you get when you have made it. Robert Frank chronicles the life of the ultra-rich who inhabit a world most people... Read more
Published on 30 July 2007 by Charles Anderson
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