Book review: The Rich: From Slaves To Super Yachts, A 2,000 Year History

The rich are different, even more different that we ever imagined, discovers Marjorie Brennan, the only problem is the gap between them and us is widening.

The Rich: From Slaves To Super Yachts, A 2,000 Year History - By John Kampfner 

Little, Brown, €36.50; 

ebook, €15.99

WHILE the recession has bestowed on the hoi polloi the joys of austerity and new phrases such as the ‘squeezed middle’, it has seen an expansion in the number of billionaires and their wealth.

According to recent research in the US, there are a record 2,325 billionaires in the world, up 7% from last year, and their total wealth has increased 12% in the same period to $7.3 trillion. It would appear that the rich are indeed getting richer and the poor poorer, a state of affairs that has hardly changed since the origins of society.

In this enjoyable and thought-provoking book, John Kampfner looks at the lives of the super rich, from the scions of the Roman republic to the oligarchs of Russia and the more recently minted whiz kids of Silicon Valley.

Kampfner begins with a blanket assumption that we are all obsessed with the super-rich: “We say we loathe what they have done to society, but we love to read about them in glossy magazines and to chart their success on lists.”

As someone who chucks the Sunday Times’ much-trumpeted annual rich list in the bin without a second glance, for fear it will make me regurgitate my breakfast, I can’t say I agree. However, Kampfner does provide a well-written and fascinating insight into how different the super-rich are from the rest of us. What may take you aback is the sheer scale of that difference. The ostentatious display of wealth has long been a hallmark of humanity.

Croesus, whose name remains in circulation as a comparative term when it comes to wealth, was fond of giving oracles gold ingots weighing 150 pounds, and topping up his gift with, for example, a 600-pound lion made of gold. Mansa Musa, the ruler of Mali, travelled with an entourage of 60,000 people (waited on hand and foot by 12,000 slaves): consider the expense alone of keeping that number of people fed and housed.

Kampfner’s book looks at case studies going back into antiquity, such as those cited above, but he also pays due attention to the super-rich who are with us now, the notorious 1%, disliked by the Occupy movement and, if truth be told, almost everybody else. If there’s envy at the root of that dislike, it’s well earned.

In America that 1% own 40% of that nation’s wealth, which means that the ‘top’ 300,000 Americans have almost as much money as the ‘bottom’ 150 million. Not all of that is inherited wealth, either — Kampfner points out that 30 years ago, the average American chief executive earned 42 times the wage of his average employee: nowadays that figure is closer to 380 times the average.

Not that Kampfner focuses unduly on those ‘in trade’ to use Downton Abbey parlance. He also looks at nobility like Cosimo de Medici and Louis XIV and combines their experiences in later chapters with robber barons like Andrew Carnegie and the mega-manufacturing Krupp family.

There’s a common thread in the search for legitimacy through legacy, of course: take the de Medici’s patronage of the arts, which was linked to Cosimo’s desire for salvation in the afterlife: a contemporary observed that “He had prickings of conscience that certain portions of his wealth — where it came from I cannot say — had not been righteously gained.” That those words might be attached to the biographies of many of the wealthy featured in this book is undeniable.

The crucial figure is Andrew Carnegie, the self-made man who ended the 19th century as the richest man in America; Carnegie wrote The Gospel of Wealth, which was simultaneously a plea for free-market Darwinism and a handbook for the wealthy to embrace his style of philanthrocapitalism (“In bestowing charity, the main consideration should be to help those who will help themselves.”)

Little wonder that Chuck Feeney, the Irish-American whose millions have benefited so many on this island, gave copies of The Gospel of Wealth to his children when explaining that he planned on giving away most of their inheritance.

Kampfner goes on to examine the sheikhs, oligarchs and tech entrepreneurs of recent times. He also devotes a chapter to ‘The bankers’ (the urge to replace the first letter of the second word with a different consonant is, naturally, compelling).

I found this hard to read, for the same reason I discard the rich list, but it was worth persevering with for an insight into how the global economy ended up where it did, as well as giving this priceless quote from Rolling Stone magazine’s essay on Goldman Sachs another well-deserved airing: “The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid relentlessly jabbing its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Kampfner adds: “Goldman’s response was to point out that vampire squids are harmless to humans.” Which probably tells you all you need to know about super-rich bankers.

Kampfner comes to the depressingly predictable conclusion that a fair distribution of wealth is but a pipe dream and that in the end, people will get away with whatever they think they can.

“The promises made in 2007 and 2008, at the height of the crash — to learn lessons and introduce fundamental change — now seem quaint,” he writes.

He finishes with the far from revelatory statement that the victory of the super-rich in the 21st century is a product of 2,000 years of history. And as we know, that has a tendency to repeat itself.