I am told that a commentary I wrote on wealth will be heard on this evening’s (Tuesday’s) All Things Considered. I’ll post a link to the audio here when it’s up.

Update: here’s the link to the audio. I’m told by people in New York and Chicago that a technical glitch cut it off in the middle. Transcript, after the jump.

The other day, I heard an gentleman who had written a book about young oil traders, guys who made millions of a dollars a year, or sometimes a day, as living out what he called “the new American dream.” Once, he said, our parents dreamed of a house with a white picket fence. Now, we dream of taking a private jet to our fourth home in Aspen.

At more or less the same time, the Democratic Senate failed to pass a bill that would raise the income tax on private equity managers from around 15% to around 35%, the rate the rest of us pay on our income. This seemed like a no-brainer for Democrats, as some of these managers make more than a hundred million dollars a year, and there are less than a thousand of them… not exactly a powerful voting bloc. The bill went nowhere, and nobody seems to care.

The insight explains the action. The American people doesn’t mind preferential treatment of the superwealthy, because on some level, these days, we all expect to someday join their ranks. . Stop anybody on the street, and they will be able to rattle off a catalog of ways to become a millionaire. Here of some of them:

Think of a way to make a lot of people look at your website.

Train Oprah’s Dog. Or, since that’s been done, become Oprah’s orthodontist. Or if THAT’s been done, do something nice for Oprah that nobody has thought to do before.

Get on American idol, and win.

Go to Dubai. Figure out something they want in Dubai. Sell it to them.

The chances of any of these things happening, to the closest approximation, are zero. The american economy, at least the cutting edge, aspirational part of it, is based on a whole bunch of people arranging themselves in a vast field and hoping for lightning to strike. Many of them run over to where lightning last struck, hoping it will hit them this time.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to get rich, but the strange thing is: most of the people with these billionaire dreams are already among the richest people ever to walk the planet. I myself have more material wealth than 99% of all the human beings who have ever lived, and I work in public radio. A Medieval Emperor would look at my stocked refrigerator, my closets filled with clothes, my powerful machinery, and immediately start coming up with ideas for a new website, so he could live the dream.

It may be that we are programmed, by evolution, to always want more than we have. Perhaps it was that those among our ancient ancestors who were happy eating bananas and the odd squirrel that died of old age, thanks, were forced out of the gene pool by the ambitious younger cro-magnons, the guys who had a sharp business plan for hunting a mammoth and had attracted some impressive venture capital to buy some spears.

Whatever the reason, we’ll never escape it. The New York Times recently ran a feature on a guy who made a hundred million dollars on the internet before he was 30. After a miserable year of doing nothing, he’s started a new business: his only goal? Make more money than he did the first time.

Me, I’ve got a great plan for finally being able to afford my own jet. There are a bunch of guys over there, in a field, running around hoping to be struck by lightning. I’m going to go sell them metal rods to stick up in the air. Hopefully, one of them will get lucky with it, and then get to talk about it on Oprah. See you in Aspen.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 11:10 am and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.