Realm of the SUPER RICH
Oakland author tackles the growing wealth gap and offers glimpse into the lives of the extremely affluent
Supercars, private jets, mega-yachts, $1,500 cocktails, nannies trained to fight off kidnappers: The mega-rich live far differently than the rest of us. But thanks to a general reluctance to have their lives exposed to public view, the worlds of billionaires and their ilk remain largely out of sight.
Oakland author Michael Mechanic’s nonfiction book “Jackpot” (Simon & Schuster) provides a rare window into what it’s like to be really, really rich — to shell out $10 million for a Marin County mansion or $60 million on a Lake Tahoe compound, drop $2,200 on date-night sushi in Beverly Hills, or bulletproof a wine cellar.
Mechanic lives in a modest house in a mixed-income zone between the poverty of Oakland’s flatlands and the wealth of its hills, amid a widening economic gulf across the Bay Area and California between those with vast holdings and those who struggle simply to find a home. Mechanic works as a senior editor at the highly billionaire-critical magazine Mother Jones, and says he felt like “a fish out of water” while researching his book. But he did not set out to pillory the wildly prosperous, nor did he wish to after getting to know many of them.
“The super-rich lead surreal lives, a lot of them, full of jets and charity galas and prenups, but they suffer from a lot of the same problems and insecurities we all face,” he says.
Fixing the problems that flow from unequal distribution of wealth won’t come through rage and armed insurrection, he says. “You cannot solve a problem unless you can get people with money and power on your side,” Mechanic says during an interview in his small backyard. “Just hating on the rich is not going do that. The revolution has to come from within, it has to come from good people having access to power standing up and saying, ‘Something’s got to change.’
“The growing distance between us in terms of wealth and opportunity is really tearing at the soul of America.”
This news organization sat down recently with Mechanic to discuss his book and the research that produced it. His comments have been edited for length and clarity.
Q California is famously liberal and yet there’s a certain admiration for the billionaires in our midst — what do you make of that?
A We have these collective, longstanding myths that we hold in America that hard work and grit and perseverance will lead to success. That
is demonstrably false. We fetishize ragsto-riches stories and in fact those stories are very rare, but we look to those stories and we look to those people who have succeeded and say, ‘Hey, that could be me.’ It’s hard to move up, especially when all the advantages keep circulating back. The rich kids get to go to a private school. They have all the advantages in getting into top colleges. It’s sort of a vicious cycle: the ‘meritocracy’ which is only meritocracy if you’re already in it.
Q Did you find any shared attributes of the super rich that came from being rich?
A There’s an obsession with privacy. Even the people who want to talk about themselves don’t want to say too much. There’s a fear of being misunderstood and being disliked. There’s a sensitivity among very wealthy people about how they’re perceived, maybe more so than most of us. They know that there’s antipathy toward the very wealthy. They don’t necessarily think that’s fair. The idea is, ‘We didn’t make the rules.’ But whether you made the rules or not, unless you’re working to change them, you’re kind of complicit, because you’re benefiting from them. It’s the same as people who say, ‘I’m not racist.’ But you’ve benefited if you’re White in this country. You’ve benefited economically and socially.
Q Nearly everywhere you go in California, homeless people’s camps are a reminder of pervasive destitution — how do you see those, in light of the extreme wealth you wrote about?
A There’s been such a staggering acceleration of the wealth gap and the ability to be able to afford a home, even in a place like Oakland. When you get into chronic homelessness, it’s really kind of immoral when you think about the degree to which people who are already blessed with financial security are given advantages. You have a rise in visible homelessness and on the other hand you have a continuation of wealthy people being given perks that detract from our ability to solve those problems.
Q After writing “Jackpot,” what still makes you scratch your head about wealth in this country?
A There are things that frustrate me. When a wealthy person is caught committing major tax fraud, they usually can just settle, when what they did is steal millions of dollars. Meanwhile a kid who robs a liquor store gets 10 years in prison. Our society protects people with wealth from consequences. I find it baffling in a society that purports to be egalitarian.
Q What are the underlying motivations for super-accumulation of wealth?
A I’ve got to think that fear is a big motivator. This is another thing that goes with the wealth divide. People think, ‘I don’t want my children to be on the wrong side of this divide.’ On Wall Street in particular it’s sort of this dog-eat-dog, materialistic culture of ‘get all you can.’ There’s a human condition to never be satisfied with what you have. Once you hit a few hundred million dollars you can live like a billionaire for all intents and purposes. There’s really nothing more to gain except maybe status and political power. There’s nothing material. There’s definitely the one-upmanship, especially in … very wealthy areas — as one guy put it, ‘keeping up with
the fancy Joneses.’
Q What government action could help reverse the trend toward accumulation of wealth by a few people?
A A lot of it has to do with taxation. One thing that states and the federal government could do is make sure people aren’t passing billions of dollars to their offspring. People say it’s their money, they earned that money, but part of the way they earned it is by being given public advantages and by hoarding the money, and avoiding taxes. The antipathy toward taxation that has arisen in this country is a dangerous thing.