November/December 2000 | Contents

"WEALTH PORN" AND BEYOND

BY GARY ANDREW POOLE

Forbes magazine led off a May 2, 1998 story this way: "Do you know where you're going to be this summer? Nantucket, Napa, Jackson Hole, the south of France?" This might come across like cocktail chit-chat at Steve Forbes's country club, but in fact it is a water-cooler question for more and more people. Between 1995 and 1998, a million more Americans entered the ranks of the millionaires' club. To be considered rich in some circles now you have to be a pentamillionaire.

There is much to celebrate about the recent economic boom. Prosperity is better than the opposite, and the strong economy has not just greased the upper crust: the percentage of Americans living in poverty declined to 11.8 percent in 1999, the lowest poverty rate since 1969. "If you don't think the economy is doing well now," says Frank Wykoff, an economics professor at Pomona College, "you are a malcontent."

America is doing well, thanks, and the press is reporting the phenomenon. But do we over-celebrate the New Wealth, giving the reader the impression that he's the only one who isn't loaded, or that being rich is all that matters? Are we analyzing the ramifications of the new prosperity?

Among all of the stories on New Wealth, there is one strain that can only be described as "wealth porn": pieces that don't simply observe the positive cash flow into our Gucci billfolds/Kate Spade purses but make excessively broad generalizations and blindly venerate money. For an example, take Time magazine's October 18, 1999, piece about spas. "A massage now seems incomplete unless one is rubbed with freshly grated ginger or kneaded with heated stones (some of which are even placed between your toes) culled from southwestern rivers. Just trying to choose the right facial can raise your blood pressure . . . ."

Or take this Minneapolis Star Tribune story from July 3, 2000, about dressing kids in haute couture: "What began with a trickle of posh merchandise from such shops as Bon Point and Jacadi on Madison Avenue has become a deluge . . . . Now, new moms of means can stock up on DKNY cashmere cardigans ($60), Baby Dior jumpers ($165), Ralph Lauren velvet frocks ($110), Tommy Hilfiger khakis ($26), Jay Kos cashmere dresses ($395), and booties emblazoned with Gucci double-Gs ($145)."

It is entertaining to describe this stuff, but many stories do little beyond documenting sprees of consumption. The formula is this: someone is spending an outrageous amount of money for something -- wow!

Some recent examples: a breathless page-one piece in New York's Daily News on June 26 about a new restaurant where, with wine and tip, dinner runs $500 ("The interior is so chichi women will have special stools just to rest their handbags."); a June New York magazine cover story on living in the city -- "What It Really Costs To Live in New York" -- which barely nodded to the possibility that some readers might not make six-figure salaries; a July 7, 2000 Washington Post piece about the hot new trend of chartering $250,000-a-week yachts and buying $26,500 Patek Philippe watches.

Expensive living is certainly a sign of the times, and gossip about the the rich is fun and probably not useless. But better articles tend to go beyond the numbers and the price tags, and explore the implications of new patterns of wealth and consumption. One such example: an October article in San Francisco magazine (disclosure: I'm a contributing writer to the magazine) about private schools, which instead of providing a standard list of the best schools, profiled the marketing director for Banana Republic, whose son had been rejected by a chic private school. The story followed her as she tried to figure out why. But along the way it asked hard and interesting questions: Why do so many of Silicon Valley's new wealthy -- raised middle class, public school educated, and avowed egalitarians -- passionately believe that their children should wear the crest of a private school? Although the piece didn't go quite far enough, it raised some questions about the benefits of a private school education. Using the woman's narrative as a hook, the story offered a nuanced look into a difficult subject.

"The permutations of the new wealth have been under-reported," says Bret Israel, editor of the Southern California Living Section of the Los Angeles Times, and an editor who has tried to push fresher stories about the New Wealth into the paper. Israel says the Times has produced a few good ones, including a piece on how money has resulted in more contentious divorces.

While writing about the New Wealth has become more fashionable, Israel says he reads too many vapid articles about twentysomething millionaires. Stories about rich young people, in fact, have become routine. See Fortune's September 18 cover story "Really Young, Really Rich," for example, or the September 18 cover in Barron's, "The New Rich." That one pictured a young woman swimming in a pool of $100 bills. "I think the under-thirty people have been overrated -- way overrated," says Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes magazine and founder of Forbes ASAP, a technology supplement to the magazine. "Many of the under-thirty crowd are stuck with worthless stock at DownTheTubes.com. The over-thirty group is probably underestimated, thanks to gains in real estate and stocks."

For all the missed opportunities, there have been some very good stories about the New Wealth. Patricia Leigh Brown, for example, wrote an article for The New York Times about the effect of big money on the values of the children who live in Silicon Valley. "A new sort of American childhood is being forged," she wrote on March 9, "in the land where each day brings the dawn of an estimated sixty new millionaires." Brown says she had "a lot of reaction" to the piece. She thinks readers have a strong desire to read more stories about the boom's impact on values, and about the soul-searching that, along with optimism, sometimes accompanies a flush stock portfolio.

Gary Andrew Poole is a free-lance writer who lives in San Francisco.