Review
peter s. goodman
HUFFINGTON
09.23.12
Much of the story behind this concentration of wealth
is familiar. Globalization has placed the best and brightest kids in New York in direct competition with their
counterparts in New Delhi, creating new opportunities
and new pitfalls. Roaring economic growth in China, India and other emerging markets has produced a fresh
crop of billionaires. The spread of technology has accelerated globalization while rendering many jobs vulnerable
to automation, pitting the interests of cost-cutting corporate overseers against those of ordinary workers.
But the key insight in Freeland’s book — an expansion
of a widely read magazine article she penned last year in
The Atlantic — is how these forces of change have become so potent that they have managed to sow angst even
under the roofs of mere multi-millionaires cognizant that
billionaires now rule.
Faced with new opportunity twinned with widening inequality, nearly everyone worries about their hold
on their station. Even the occupants of the lower rungs
of the 1 percent feel insecure, making them disinclined
to split their winnings to finance government services
needed only by those who have, to their minds, failed to
master the game. (In an age in which $25,000-a-year
preschool seems a prerequisite for Harvard and lucrative
careers ever after, who wants to pay taxes to finance public school for other people’s children?)
In Freeland’s telling, one crucial factor distinguishes today’s uber-rich from their forebears: They carry a
striking sense of entitlement, seeing themselves as people
who have constructed their own fortunes, as opposed to
aristocrats who inherited their affluence. Freeland calls
them the “working rich,” and she makes clear that this is
indeed how they see themselves. Given their self conceptions as rugged individualists whose wealth reflects not
the accident of birth but their own pluck and savvy, they