The Weird World Of Economics

AT this time every year, there’s chatter about the magnitude of year-end bonuses in the financial sector, and the attendant fallout (or trickle-down): large tables at Peter Luger will be hard to come by in December; co-op sales will be healthy in January; and the gals who work the poles at Scores will receive more marriage proposals (and when the men who are proposing turn out to be already married, more jewelry) than ever before.

This year’s special contribution to the canon may be the argument that the moment has arrived for a battle that looks to most of the population like a battle among peers, which in a sense it is: the rich versus the rich, the meritocrats versus the meritocrats, the ambitious versus the ambitious. But it also pits two highly distinct groups, the merely rich and the superrich.

Let’s define the terms first, or at least make some attempt to. The merely rich are those whose income puts them in the top 1 percent of the population. According to a recent study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, the average real income for the top 1 percent of American taxpaying households was $940,000 in 2004 — a difficult group to feel pity for. But to stand for a moment on its shores (let’s pretend) and look toward the rapidly growing ranks of the superrich is to stare across a vast chasm indeed.

The superrich might be the top tenth of 1 percent (average real household income for 2004: $4.5 million) or the top hundredth (the $20-million-a-year households). Income inequality is growing fastest the higher we go up the chart. While the percentage change in average real household income between 1990 and 2004 was an increase of 2 percent for the bottom 90 percent of American households, it was 57 percent for the top 1 percent; and shot up to 85 percent for the top 0.1 percent; and up to 112 percent for the top .01 percent. That is, the richest are getting richer almost twice as fast as the rich.

Class warfare has been hypothesized by various publications, including the online magazine Slate, New York magazine and Matt Miller in Fortune last month. Mr. Miller calls the bigger and poorer group, which consists largely of professionals — doctors, lawyers, management consultants, the vast majority of Wall Street soldiers — the “lower-uppers.” The targets of their resentment, he says, are by and large hedge fund managers and certain astronomically paid C.E.O.’s.

“The problem is that there’s all this wealth at this new strata that feels unrelated to merit or achievement,” Mr. Miller says. “When a C.E.O. whose leadership has caused a company’s stock price to fall gets a $100 million golden parachute, or when a guy’s running so much money that his commission — even if his picks are only getting an 8 or 10 percent return on his client’s money — is $100 million, that’s crazy.” He says that such compensation “goes against the notion of a meritocracy.”

Or maybe not. “A meritocracy increases inequality — by its very nature, it has to,” says Nicholas Lemann, whose book “The Big Test” explored the history of the SAT and the American meritocracy. “The goal was equality of opportunity, not equality of result.”

Part of the problem may lie with the fact that the members of both classes went into their respective lines of work with the goal of making a lot of money, and one just happens to make several times more of it.

Take the lawyers. “Lawyers are an odd group,” says the novelist Louis Begley, whose day job for several decades has been practicing law with the white-shoe firm Debevoise & Plimpton. “Lawyers at the great law firms earn a lot of money. But for a good many of them, it’s impossible to do so without accepting anything but cases involving huge corporate deals that generate a great many hours they can charge for. But these deals are repetitive. And the lawyers in these transactions often play second fiddle to the bankers.”

The money paid to investment bankers, who were once the stronghold of the financial elite, typically pales next to hedge-fund money. “I recently hosted a panel with Carl Icahn at the Core Club where the whole point was that if you’re an investment banker nowadays, you’re kind of a schlepper,” says Michael Wolff, a Vanity Fair writer who has often written about the moneyed classes. “Investment banking is for the C+ students now. Where you want to be is not somebody who’s advising people with money — whose currency is intellectual capital — but somebody whose currency is money itself.”

This, too, may be what irks the professional classes. Managing a hedge fund is the purest abstraction of making money out of money — there is no other product to show for it.

The resentment may be intensified in New York, a city whose physical layout has always engendered a lot of class-mixing. The middle class might have been largely squeezed out of Manhattan over the past decade, but the merely rich and the superrich still live in the same neighborhoods (if not necessarily the same buildings), buy houses in the same Hamptons (just houses of very different scales), and send their children to the same schools.

Mr. Lemann said that the rich versus richer envy factor “assumes that the relatively poor group is bumping into the most upper income.”

He added, “You might only see it at, say, functions that parents go to at certain rarefied private schools — Fieldston, say, or Harvard-Westlake in Los Angeles.”

Even Mr. Begley, who has earned enough to raise a large family in a grand apartment on Park Avenue, said he was astonished by the sheer number of billionaires he has met in recent years.

“I must say, I’ve begun to feel in New York as if I were driving a Volkswagen on the highway when a Greyhound bus happens to go by,” he said. “At which point, I feel a whoosh of air blasting me off the road. These people belong to another species.”

Except, he said, that it’s “these young Wall Street types” buying up the apartments in his building. “There are maybe four or five of us who bought our apartments at some understandable price 30 years ago,” he said. “And then these new people — I must say, with the money seems to come a rather large physical size. Some of them are polite, but the men do fill the elevator cage. And the women always seem to have a bottle of water attached to their mouths.”

He added that he did not feel any need to engage in class warfare against his neighbors. “If I did, they might crush me against the elevator wall,” he said. “The only thing to do is get adopted by them.”

NYTimes.Com

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