he continual raising of the bar of what constitutes wealth culture in the United States has made efforts to understand rich people a particularly challenging pursuit. Rather than just the traditional distinction of “old” vs. “new” money, today’s American rich comprise a complex sub-culture, a far richer, so to speak, group of people than ever existed or could exist in Fitzgerald’s time. The trope of old vs. new money is a tired one, certainly relevant a century or half-century ago but now a distinction that means little with the once defining characteristics of American wealth culture virtually completely eroded.“Old money” certainly exists, especially in older epicenters of wealth like New York and Boston but, four of five generations after their turn-of-the-century kin made their millions (when a million was really a million), most family wealth has been scattered (and squandered). Wealth culture is today much more fragmented and tribal than that of decades past but the mythology of Old Money is remarkably persistent, making many of our assumptions and beliefs about rich people flawed and misleading. As well, the dynamics of wealth are heavily obscured by our absurd obsession with “luxury,” that overused, underdelivered term that many mistakenly define as the sole interest of the rich. Net net, the great diversity within wealth culture makes understanding the rich challenging, to say the least, demanding new and different research techniques grounded in psychology and other social sciences.
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