Books: Masters of the universe

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making

by David Rothkopf

Little, Brown, 376pp, £20

Richistan: A Journey Through the 21st Century Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich

by Robert Frank

Piatkus, 277pp, £7.99


SHOULD WE WORRY ABOUT THE rich? They seem to be losing money all over the place, although it's mostly other people's money – ours, actually – and they don't seem terribly happy in their monster mansions, their super yachts, their marriages or even their TV reality shows; think of poor, disinherited Paris Hilton, flailing wildly for attention, although of course she's just "affluent" now.

They're a gaudy spectacle, our high-rent carnival. They make up new social rules as they go along and strangle in them; some of them need counselling, some of them need a good tailor and some need an Asbo. We're right, aren't we, to sit tight on our little incomes and try to patronise them?

These two books suggest otherwise, in rather different ways. Robert Frank says a third of America's wealth belongs to one per cent of the population, and the share is rising; which is a remarkable political fact because nobody yet seems furious about it. The result, since trickle-down economics don't actually work, is an economy where stonemasons prosper in the suburbs (the rich need walls, after all) but the rest of the economy no longer seems very good at serving human needs.

David Rothkopf has a much bigger and less jolly subject: how the autonomous republic of Richistan, the separated world of the rich, may be distracting us from the inequality of power in the world. In a globalised world, fewer and fewer people truly shape our lives – maybe 6,000 in all – and they're more likely to do deals than morals. They're at the top of a worldwide class system which answers to nobody. Our very own democratic deficit runs ruinously deep.

This isn't the usual conspiracy theory, and Rothkopf has actually been up magic mountain – to Davos for the World Economic Forum; indeed, he's very sharp on why the Bilderberg group ("Oprah Winfrey has more influence") is probably not a secret world government, why the Trilateral Commission ("has-beens who do not have power except to convene themselves") is not going to abolish the US constitution any day soon and even the prancing Republicans of Bohemian Grove don't run America ("too drunk"). His emphasis on Davos – the club that lets him in – might be suspect except that he makes a very good case for seeing the Forum as a window into the constant contact of the world's elite, their fretfulness, their certainties, their fundamental problem, which is this: if society is so meritocratic, why can't everyone aspire to be as rich and influential as they are?

Social mobility is sluggish in the USA, almost at a standstill in Britain. The rich can't quite aspire to be the very, very rich and meanwhile, all the gaps grow wider. The average CEO makes 400 times what the person on the assembly line makes. The dotcom millionaires fret at the $1.65 billion paid over to the creators of online phenomenon YouTube what seems like ten minutes after the site went live.

The gaps grow between nations, too. A hundred years ago, the richest countries were maybe nine times richer than the poorest; now they – the United States, the EU and Japan – are a hundred times as rich as poor, wrecked Guinea-Bissau. Indeed, Luxembourg, the richest country of all in terms of GDP per head, is actually 267 times as rich as Guinea-Bissau.

You don't have to dream of a flat, equal world to understand the fearful problems that come from grotesque inequality and the Superclass may be coming to the end of their favourite solution, globalisation. For years, the World Bank exported privatisation, neoliberal economics, free trade, lighter regulation and making basic needs like water into someone else's property. One result, as Rothkopf points out, was that their poster child – Argentina – was hugely successful until it crashed, burned and went hungry.

His analysis is subtle, fascinating and interesting most of all because it is properly historical: that is, he knows things can change. Where he names his 6,000, you find not just the obvious Rupert Murdochs but also Wu Xiaoling – the woman who runs foreign reserves for the People's Bank of China – and other less familiar names. His book is important not so much for its originality, although it's new to discuss our new kinds of power and powerlessness at length, but because it is written by a semi-insider.

It also opens up all kinds of fascinating questions, asking, for example, whether the rich are also being distracted from the facts of all our lives?

It can seem so. The way Frank reports their existence, they seem almost obliged to miss the point. Their yachts get so grand and long they have to be kept at the grimy end of the docks with a view of oil tankers, instead of close to the clubhouse with the nice white sailboats. Owners complain they stand on deck and feel too far from the water.

Wear a truly expensive Franck Muller watch and you need a second watch to tell the actual time (the Muller version has scrambled numbers and moves five hours at a time.) A penthouse full of steel and art becomes unliveable, the Google guys hang their hammocks to feel comfortable in a big private plane, your holiday home has a staircase modelled on the Titanic (Richistanis do not do irony). You buy a Bentley but only because it's an obligation – a $50,000 (£25,000) Mercedes just won't do. To stand out you have to have the car "to have" – and then you spoil the famous, perfect quiet with blasts of rap music.

The luxury labels everyone knows – Gucci, say – won't do any more because they're far too available. The art works you buy for the sake of visibly spending money are B-minus pictures whose price is their whole point – you wouldn't admit to looking hard at them. The new wealthy would hate to be considered an old-fashioned leisure class. They're workaholic.

The rich – the ones who want to be seen to be rich – have always had this talent for making life inconvenient; think of the sad flocks of aristos tethered in Versailles. They've always built narrow, exclusive worlds through which to squeeze their lives. In old New York, the greatest privilege at a ball was to join Mrs Astor on her divan and social ruin faced any woman whose hips were too ample to sit beside that well-upholstered matron. Money could always excuse impossible manners, but people with manners did like a moment or two of feeling superior to serious money.

So what's new? For a start, new money is genuinely new, and it often belongs to people in their thirties or forties; they made it and they have time to spend it. You can make a company and sell it for billions, especially during the internet boom, within a matter of years. Once you have the billions, you don't lose an appetite for work. But what if, however much you work, you can never hope to join the super-rich? What if the new underclass, grumbling and struggling, is the rich?

Of course, you might care to back some politicians, in which case American politics will gratefully amplify the sound of your money talking; or you might think about setting up your own charity, run on businesslike lines and being seen to change the world.

Then again, you could lose it all so quickly. Should you mistime your "liquidity event" – in civilian talk, selling your company for a barrowload of cash – it might never happen at all. Markets are volatile. Your eager borrowings can always be called in. The investments you make have, year by year, become so abstract that the notion of value is obsolete – think of our own dear banks and their sub-prime moment.

So you actually need to be mega-rich, at least in the billions, before there's any sense of security. Richistanis are afraid, it seems, and the diamonds, the houses, the Bentleys and the yachts are just their tranquilisers.

Smile for a moment, taste the delicious schadenfreude, because it won't last. The fact is that the good folk of Richistan have incomes that grow in double digits every year while the rest of us are stalled at best (and the best won't last much longer, not with oil and wheat prices where they are). It's not chic to disapprove of wealth, and not very interesting either, but when security, health and your children's learning all depend on having more money than you can hope for, that's political. Every public, unnecessary indulgence of the über-rich, each sermon on how much we should admire the hedge fund operators (until, of course, they accidentally knock over a few banks), each refusal to ask the very rich non-doms to pay proper taxes, isn't innocent. It's a new prop for the same system that is doing the rest of us actual harm.

When you hear a politician promising both cheap homes and to keep house prices high in almost the same breath, you know you're in trouble. When you find one stroking the super-rich and announcing he wants to end poverty and open all careers to all the talents, you know the politician is doing what politicians do best: not thinking. A brief course of Rothkopf on the Superclass just might help.