John Gapperreviews a well-timed inquiry into what makes the new rich tick - and finds a banality

F Scott Fitzgerald once observed: "The very rich are different from you and me." On the evidence of this book, however, this is not true. Actually, the new rich - the hedge fund managers, Wall Street financiers, dotcom entrepreneurs and oil barons - are disappointingly similar.

They crave bigger houses than their neighbours, as well as faster cars, longer yachts and nicer watches. They can be careless with money, getting into debt and not only making billions but losing them again. A lot of them envy what other, richer, people have got and work diligently to catch up. Fewer than half of them believe money has made them happier.

So, not much difference there. Robert Frank, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal who writes a column and a blog about wealthy Americans, has trawled diligently across country estates, golf courses and yacht marinas to find out what makes the new rich tick. But all that he uncovers is the banality of wealth: divide the money by 10, 100 or 1,000 and there stands Everyman.

As Frank observes, this is the raw face of newly acquired wealth, before those who have it have got into the right clubs, created their own foundations and learned to talk in a hush about what they own. In places such as Greenwich, Connecticut, the hedge fund capital of the east coast, the fight between old and new money plays out again.

Financiers and "instapreneurs" - entrepreneurs who suddenly find that they are enormously wealthy - are still frowned upon by the establishment. Wall Street figures such as Steve Cohen, who Frank estimates has spent $700 million on art, find it harder to acquire social cachet.

This is a well-timed inquiry because the US is in the middle of what Frank calls the "third wave" of wealth generation, following the Gilded Age of the late 19th century and the Roaring 1920s. The latest wave is creating mind-boggling personal wealth with pedestrian regularity; billionaires are minted with every surge in the US stock market. There were 14 billionaires in the US in 1985; now there are more than 1,000 and rising.

This phenomenon is going on elsewhere in the world too: the commodity and energy boom has made billionaires and multi-millionaires out of lots of people in Latin America and the Middle East, and the rise of China and India is contributing more.

But the US has a particularly touchy relationship with wealth. Americans believe in entrepreneurship and the right of people to profit from their efforts, but they are uneasy at the class division this entails.

Like the well-trained news journalist he is, Frank ties his hands behind his back before he starts, declaring that he will not reach a judgment on whether this is a good or a bad thing. Instead, he says, he will act like "the best foreign correspondents" and give us a guided tour of the world that he dubs Richistan.

This is fine as far as it goes, and Frank researches his subject thoroughly and writes in a vivid and engaging way. The problem is that Richistan is not a very interesting place, compared with, say, Pakistan or Uzbekistan.

Not a lot goes on there, in between people deciding on whether to switch to a Bentley from the BMW.

Frank penetrates the veil of secrecy behind which modern wealth is shrouded to find a bland visage.

After a bit, the reader starts to feel sorry for all these people who struggle to cope with their wealth and maintain the illusion that they are still just regular folks.

One billionaire goes to Starbucks for his coffee rather than have one of his 105 staff brew it for him because he likes to mix with the hoi-polloi. Schadenfreude is pleasure in the misfortunes of others, but what is pleasure in the fact that others' fortunes do not make them happy? Whatever it is, I felt it.

In the end, Frank lets his mask of objectivity slip.

One always has the feeling that he disapproves of such rampant inequality, even if pretending not to mind helps him to get interviews with billionaires. He tells of a nauseating trip to a luxury boat show in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and expresses hope that the new rich will stop spending so much on themselves and give more away.

If so, new money will once again have grown up to become old. - ( Financial Times service )