Show me the money. Show it to me in the dedicated pages of national newspapers, in documentaries and TV series and on social media, where influencers make their money by showing me the money. Let me revel in all the clichés we’re offered – the poorer man’s idea of wealth, defined by supercars and mega-yachts, houses pent and country, dinky handbags and preposterous watches, fat cigars, deep tans, Tic Tac teeth and honed abs, for even the body is performative of money these days. Tom Wolfe would be slack-jawed.
Forty years ago he coined the sadly forgotten term ‘plutography’, to capture the then prevailing trend for the publishing business to offer readers a monthly dose of full-colour insight into how the other half lived. The New York Times somewhat downplayed the meaning behind Wolfe’s coinage, no pun intended, describing it as capturing a demand for writing about the lifestyles of the much, much better off. Rather Wolfe’s ‘plutography’, of course, was more a deliberate play on ‘pornography’, with all that suggests of our baser natures, our compulsions.
He described it as the ‘graphic depiction of the acts of the rich’, the true motivation to titillate hidden by an ostensible desire to educate readers on design or antiques or fine food. He argued that the restraint of the 1960s and 1970s – when it would have been considered bad taste to flaunt your wealth – had broken down. ‘Greed is good’, as the 1980s had it. And we’ve been on a downward slope ever since, both in terms of the readiness of the rich to flaunt it – see John Caudwell’s recently unveiled £250,000 statue of himself – and in our obsession with it.
Research repeatedly affirms the adage that money doesn’t buy you happiness; a lesson some of us finally come to understand as we grow older. But that’s not the prevailing tenor of our times. Rather it’s the contradictions of calls to tax the rich while simultaneously salivating over their excesses; a desire to punish them for their good fortune – or bad, depending on your politics – while aspiring to live just like them. We celebrate as we denigrate.
Yet the iconography of their wealth, as predictable and pedestrian as much of it is (money doesn’t buy you happiness, nor much originality it seems) is everywhere and inescapable. Millionaires are two-a-penny. A billion used to be an incomprehensible sum. Now – whether it’s about some Silicon Valley whizz kid or government spending on debt interest – it’s bandied about as though it’s chump change.
Apple TV’s current hit series Your Friends & Neighbours perfectly encapsulates this double bind. We might watch its story of an ex-financier who starts burgling his neighbours’ homes, safe in the knowledge they have too much stuff to even notice when a six-figure trinket has disappeared – yeah, stick it to the monied man! But we’re also watching it precisely to wallow in the cavernous houses, cashmere blazers and country club living. Ditto Succession, The White Lotus, Billions. We’re a long way from kitchen sink drama these days, unless your sink is made of Carrara marble.
There was a time when our sense of material satisfaction was measured against our peers. As long as your friend or neighbour didn’t suddenly buy a new Porsche while you made do with the jalopy, that sense of your place in the world of money could maintain a calm, wilfully blind status quo. But today’s media invites us to have new peers, all around the world. Now we all live in Dubai, at least mentally.
One study last year suggests the average Brit now believes that they need over £3m in the bank to consider themselves wealthy
In this atmosphere it’s no wonder that, worryingly, schoolchildren increasingly aspire to jobs not of social value, or that satisfy at any deeper level, but those that pay big and pay quickly – the YouTube star has become the archetype – with little appreciation for the role in this very narrow definition of success of either sheer talent or dumb luck. They are equally rare.
Yet if we adults check our own mammongrams it’s easy to see how we too are easily tinged with the cancer of chasing ever more extreme affluence, even as so many of us already lead lives markedly richer than those of our forebears. One study last year suggests the average Brit now believes that they need over £3 million in the bank to consider themselves wealthy, with those in London needing £6 million.
It’s easy to understand why this might not just be avariciousness, nor a hyper-sensitivity to the wealth gap, as skewed as that is by the enormous wealth of the 0.1 per cent. With wars real and cultural, climate hysteria, an economic doom-loop, rocketing prices and the coming jobs AImageddon, it feels like we live in times of perma-crisis over which we have very little control. But somehow not for the wealthy. They appear to have achieved escape velocity from an unpredictable and unruly system that seems forever on the precipice.
That’s an illusion, of course. Maybe. But, if nothing else, how much more comfortable to go down in opulent style, sipping a martini on a sundeck, wearing one of those big fluffy robes and surrounded by so much terribly expensive stuff.
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