NYT: Very Rich Are Leaving the Merely Rich Behind
kuac...@yahoo.com
November 27, 2006
Gilded Paychecks
Very Rich Are Leaving the Merely Rich Behind
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
Photo 1: http://tinyurl.com/y7l9fj
Capation: Emile Wamsteker for The New York Times
Robert and Denise Glassman with sons Jeremy, 8, at right, and Spencer,
5, at their home in Short Hills, N.J.
Photo 2: http://tinyurl.com/y5fndf
Caption: Michael Nagle for The New York Times
"If Wall Street was not there as an alternative, I would have gone into
academia." JOHN J. MOON Managing director of a private equity firm, who
had intended to become a teacher
A decade into the practice of medicine, still striving to become "a
well regarded physician-scientist," Robert H. Glassman concluded that
he was not making enough money. So he answered an ad in the New England
Journal of Medicine from a business consulting firm hiring doctors.
And today, after moving on to Wall Street as an adviser on medical
investments, he is a multimillionaire.
Such routes to great wealth were just opening up to physicians when Dr.
Glassman was in school, graduating from Harvard College in 1983 and
Harvard Medical School four years later. Hoping to achieve
breakthroughs in curing cancer, his specialty, he plunged into
research, even dreaming of a Nobel Prize, until Wall Street reordered
his life.
Just how far he had come from a doctor's traditional
upper-middle-class expectations struck home at the 20th reunion of his
college class. By then he was working for Merrill Lynch and soon would
become a managing director of health care investment banking.
"There were doctors at the reunion -- very, very smart people," Dr.
Glassman recalled in a recent interview. "They went to the top
programs, they remained true to their ethics and really had very pure
goals. And then they went to the 20th-year reunion and saw that
somebody else who was 10 times less smart was making much more
money."
The opportunity to become abundantly rich is a recent phenomenon not
only in medicine, but in a growing number of other professions and
occupations. In each case, the great majority still earn fairly uniform
six-figure incomes, usually less than $400,000 a year, government data
show. But starting in the 1990s, a significant number began to earn
much more, creating a two-tier income stratum within such occupations.
The divide has emerged as people like Dr. Glassman, who is 45, latched
onto opportunities within their fields that offered significantly
higher incomes. Some lawyers and bankers, for example, collect much
larger fees than others in their fields for their work on business
deals and cases.
Others have moved to different, higher-paying fields -- from academia
to Wall Street, for example -- and a growing number of entrepreneurs
have seen windfalls tied largely to expanding financial markets, which
draw on capital from around the world. The latter phenomenon has
allowed, say, the owner of a small mail-order business to sell his
enterprise for tens of millions instead of the hundreds of thousands
that such a sale might have brought 15 years ago.
Three decades ago, compensation among occupations differed far less
than it does today. That growing difference is diverting people from
some critical fields, experts say. The American Bar Foundation, a
research group, has found in its surveys, for instance, that fewer law
school graduates are going into public-interest law or government jobs
and filling all the openings is becoming harder.
Something similar is happening in academia, where newly minted
Ph.D.'s migrate from teaching or research to more lucrative fields.
Similarly, many business school graduates shun careers as experts in,
say, manufacturing or consumer products for much higher pay on Wall
Street.
And in medicine, where some specialties now pay far more than others,
young doctors often bypass the lower-paying fields. The Medical Group
Management Association, for example, says the nation lacks enough
doctors in family practice, where the median income last year was
$161,000.
"The bigger the prize, the greater the effort that people are making
to get it," said Edward N. Wolff, a New York University economist who
studies income and wealth. "That effort is draining people away from
more useful work."
What kind of work is most useful is a matter of opinion, of course, but
there is no doubt that a new group of the very rich have risen today
far above their merely affluent colleagues.
Turning to Philanthropy
One in every 825 households earned at least $2 million last year,
nearly double the percentage in 1989, adjusted for inflation, Mr. Wolff
found in an analysis of government data. When it comes to wealth, one
in every 325 households had a net worth of $10 million or more in 2004,
the latest year for which data is available, more than four times as
many as in 1989.
As some have grown enormously rich, they are turning to philanthropy in
a competition that is well beyond the means of their less wealthy
peers. "The ones with $100 million are setting the standard for their
own circles, but no longer for me," said Robert Frank, a Cornell
University economist who described the early stages of the phenomenon
in a 1995 book, "The Winner-Take-All Society," which he
co-authored.
Fighting AIDS and poverty in Africa are favorite causes, and so is
financing education, particularly at one's alma mater.
"It is astonishing how many gifts of $100 million have been made in
the last year," said Inge Reichenbach, vice president for development
at Yale University, which like other schools tracks the net worth of
its alumni and assiduously pursues the richest among them.
Dr. Glassman hopes to enter this circle someday. At 35, he was making
$150,000 in 1996 (about $190,000 in today's dollars) as a
hematology-oncology specialist. That's when, recently married and
with virtually no savings, he made the switch that brought him to
management consulting.
He won't say just how much he earns now on Wall Street or his current
net worth. But compensation experts, among them Johnson Associates, say
the annual income of those in his position is easily in the seven
figures and net worth often rises to more than $20 million.
"He is on his way," said Alan Johnson, managing director of the
firm, speaking of people on career tracks similar to Dr. Glassman's.
"He is destined to riches."
Indeed, doctors have become so interested in the business side of
medicine that more than 40 medical schools have added, over the last 20
years, an optional fifth year of schooling for those who want to earn
an M.B.A. degree as well as an M.D. Some go directly to Wall Street or
into health care management without ever practicing medicine.
"It was not our goal to create masters of the universe," said James
Aisner, a spokesman for Harvard Business School, whose joint program
with the medical school started last year. "It was to train people to
do useful work."
Dr. Glassman still makes hospital rounds two or three days a month,
usually on free weekends. Treating patients, he said, is "a wonderful
feeling." But he sees his present work as also a valuable aspect of
medicine.
One of his tasks is to evaluate the numerous drugs that start-up
companies, particularly in biotechnology, are developing. These
companies often turn to firms like Merrill Lynch for an investment or
to sponsor an initial public stock offering. Dr. Glassman is a critical
gatekeeper in this process, evaluating, among other things, whether
promising drugs live up to their claims.
What Dr. Glassman represents, along with other very rich people
interviewed for this article, is the growing number of Americans who
acknowledge that they have accumulated, or soon will, more than enough
money to live comfortably, even luxuriously, and also enough so that
their children, as adults, will then be free to pursue careers "they
have a hunger for," as Dr. Glassman put it, "and not feel a need to
do something just to pay the bills."
In an earlier Gilded Age, Andrew Carnegie argued that talented managers
who accumulate great wealth were morally obligated to redistribute
their wealth through philanthropy. The estate tax and the progressive
income tax later took over most of that function -- imposing tax rates
of more than 70 percent as recently as 1980 on incomes above a certain
level.
Now, with this marginal rate at half that much and the estate tax
fading in importance, many of the new rich engage in the conspicuous
consumption that their wealth allows. Others, while certainly not
stinting on comfort, are embracing philanthropy as an alternative to a
life of professional accomplishment.
Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are held up as models, certainly by Dr.
Glassman. "They are going to make much greater contributions by
having made money and then giving it away than most, almost all,
scientists," he said, adding that he is drawn to philanthropy as a
means of achieving a meaningful legacy.
"It has to be easier than the chance of becoming a Nobel Prize
winner," he said, explaining his decision to give up research, "and
I think that goes through the minds of highly educated, high performing
individuals."
As Bush administration officials see it -- and conservative economists
often agree -- philanthropy is a better means of redistributing the
nation's wealth than higher taxes on the rich. They argue that higher
marginal tax rates would discourage entrepreneurship and risk-taking.
But some among the newly rich have misgivings.
Mark M. Zandi is one. He was a founder of Economy.com, a forecasting
and data gathering service in West Chester, Pa. His net worth vaulted
into eight figures with the company's sale last year to Moody's
Investor Service.
"Our tax policies should be redesigned through the prism that wealth
is being increasingly skewed," Mr. Zandi said, arguing that higher
taxes on the rich could help restore a sense of fairness to the system
and blunt a backlash from a middle class that feels increasingly
squeezed by the costs of health care, higher education, and a secure
retirement. The Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances, a
principal government source of income and wealth data, does not single
out the occupations and professions generating so much wealth today.
But Forbes magazine offers a rough idea in its annual surveys of the
richest Americans, those approaching and crossing the billion dollar
mark.
Some routes are of long standing. Inheritance plays a role. So do the
earnings of Wall Street investment bankers and the super incomes of
sports stars and celebrities. All of these routes swell the ranks of
the very rich, as they did in 1989.
But among new occupations, the winners include numerous partners in
recently formed hedge funds and private equity firms that invest or
acquire companies. Real estate developers and lawyers are more in
evidence today among the very rich. So are dot-com entrepreneurs as
well as scientists who start a company to market an invention or
discovery, soon selling it for many millions. And from corporate
America come many more chief executives than in the past.
Seventy-five percent of the chief executives in a sample of 100
publicly traded companies had a net worth in 2004 of more than $25
million mainly from stock and options in the companies they ran,
according to a study by Carola Frydman, a finance professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management.
That was up from 31 percent for the same sample in 1989, adjusted for
inflation.
Chief executives were not alone among corporate executives in rising to
great wealth. There were similar or even greater increases in the
percentage of lower-ranking executives -- presidents, executive vice
presidents, chief financial officers -- also advancing into the $25
million-plus category.
The growing use of options as a form of pay helps to explain the sharp
rise in the number of very wealthy households. But so does the gradual
dismantling of the progressive income tax, Ms. Frydman concluded in a
recent study.
"Our simulation results suggest that, had taxes been at their low
2000 level throughout the past 60 years, chief executive compensation
would have been 35 percent higher during the 1950s and 1960s," she
wrote.
Trying Not to Live Ostentatiously
Finally, the owners of a variety of ordinary businesses -- a small
chain of coffee shops or temporary help agencies, for example -- manage
to expand these family operations with the help of venture capital and
private equity firms, eventually selling them or taking them public in
a marketplace that rewards them with huge sums.
John J. Moon, a managing director of Metalmark Capital, a private
equity firm, explains how this process works.
"Let's say we buy a small pizza parlor chain from an entrepreneur
for $10 million," said Mr. Moon, who at 39, is already among the very
rich. "We make it more efficient, we build it from 10 stores to 100
and we sell it to Domino's for $50 million."
As a result, not only the entrepreneur gets rich; so do Mr. Moon and
his colleagues, who make money from putting together such deals and
from managing the money they raise from wealthy investors who provide
much of the capital.
By his own account, Mr. Moon, like Dr. Glassman, came reluctantly to
the accumulation of wealth. Having earned a Ph.D. in business economics
from Harvard in 1994, he set out to be a professor of finance, landing
a job at Dartmouth's Tuck Graduate School of Business, with a
starting salary in the low six figures.
To this day, teaching tugs at Mr. Moon, whose parents immigrated to the
United States from South Korea. He steals enough time from Metalmark
Capital to teach one course in finance each semester at Columbia
University's business school. "If Wall Street was not there as an
alternative," Mr. Moon said, "I would have gone into academia."
Academia, of course, turned out to be no match for the job offers that
came Mr. Moon's way from several Wall Street firms. He joined Goldman
Sachs, moved on to Morgan Stanley's private equity operation in 1998
and stayed on when the unit separated from Morgan Stanley in 2004 and
became Metalmark Capital.
As his income and net worth grew, the Harvard alumni association made
contact and he started to give money, not just to Harvard, but to
various causes. His growing charitable activities have brought him a
leadership role in Harvard alumni activities, including a seat on the
graduate school alumni council.
Still, Mr. Moon tries to live unostentatiously. "The trick is not to
want more as your income and wealth grow," he said. "You fly coach
and then you fly first class and then it is fractional ownership of a
jet and then owning a jet. I still struggle with first class. My
partners make fun of me."
His reluctance to show his wealth has a basis in his religion. "My
wife and I are committed Presbyterians," he said. "I would like to
think that my faith informs my career decisions even more than
financial considerations. That is not always easy because money is not
unimportant."
It has a momentum of its own. Mr. Moon and his wife, Hee-Jung, who gave
up law to raise their two sons, are renovating a newly purchased Park
Avenue co-op. "On an absolute scale it is lavish," he said, "but
on a relative scale, relative to my peers, it is small."
Behavior is gradually changing in the Glassman household, too. Not that
the doctor and his wife, Denise, 41, seem to crave change. Nothing in
his off-the-rack suits, or the cafes and nondescript restaurants that
he prefers for interviews, or the family's comparatively modest
four-bedroom home in suburban Short Hills, N.J., or their two cars (an
Acura S.U.V. and a Honda Accord) suggests that wealth has altered the
way the family lives.
But it is opening up "choices," as Mrs. Glassman put it. They enjoy
annual ski vacations in Utah now. The Glassmans are shopping for a
larger house -- not as large as the family could afford, Mrs. Glassman
said, but large enough to accommodate a wood-paneled study where her
husband could put all his books and his diplomas and "feel that it is
his own." Right now, a glassed-in porch, without book shelves, serves
as a workplace for both of them.
Starting out, Dr. Glassman's $150,000 a year was a bit less than that
of his wife, then a marketing executive with an M.B.A. from
Northwestern. Their plan was for her to stop working once they had
children. To build up their income, she encouraged him to set up or
join a medical practice to treat patients. Dr. Glassman initially
balked, but he was coming to realize that his devotion to research
would not necessarily deliver a big scientific payoff.
"I wasn't sure that I was willing to take the risk of spending many
years applying for grants and working long hours for the very slim
chance of winning at the roulette table and making a significant
contribution to the scientific literature," he said.
In this mood, he was drawn to the ad that McKinsey & Company, the giant
consulting firm, had placed in the New England Journal of Medicine.
McKinsey was increasingly working among biomedical and pharmaceutical
companies and it needed more physicians on staff as consultants. Dr.
Glassman, absorbed in the world of medicine, did not know what McKinsey
was. His wife enlightened him. "The way she explained it, McKinsey
was like a Massachusetts General Hospital for M.B.A.'s," he said.
"It was really prestigious, which I liked, and I heard that it was
very intellectually charged."
He soon joined as a consultant, earning a starting salary that was
roughly the same as he was earning as a researcher -- and soon $100,000
more. He stayed four years, traveling constantly and during that time
the family made the move to Short Hills from rented quarters in
Manhattan.
Dr. Glassman migrated to Merrill Lynch in 2001, first in private
equity, which he found to be more at the forefront of innovation than
consulting at McKinsey, and then gradually to investment banking, going
full time there in 2004.
Linking Security to Income
Casey McCullar hopes to follow a similar circuit. Now 29, he joined the
Marconi Corporation, a big telecommunications company, in 1999 right
out of the University of Texas in Dallas, his hometown. Over the next
six years he worked up to project manager at $42,000 a year, becoming
quite skilled in electronic mapmaking.
A trip to India for his company introduced him to the wonders of
outsourcing and the money he might make as an entrepreneur facilitating
the process. As a first step, he applied to the Tuck business school at
Dartmouth, got in and quit his Texas job, despite his mother's
concern that he was giving up future promotions and very good health
insurance, particularly Marconi's dental plan.
His life at Tuck soon sent him in still another direction. When he
graduates next June he will probably go to work for Mercer Management
Consulting, he says. Mercer recruited him at a starting salary of
$150,000, including bonus. "If you had told me a couple of years ago
that I would be making three times my Marconi salary, I would not have
believed you," Mr. McCullar said.
Nearly 70 percent of Tuck's graduates go directly to consulting firms
or Wall Street investment houses. He may pursue finance later, Mr.
McCullar says, always keeping in mind an entrepreneurial venture that
could really leverage his talent.
"When my mom talks of Marconi's dental plan and a safe
retirement," he said, "she really means lifestyle security based on
job security."
But "for my generation," Mr. McCullar said, "lifestyle security
comes from financial independence. I'm doing what I want to do and it
just so happens that is where the money is."
kuac...@yahoo.com
December 04, 2006
Photo: http://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,370514,00.jpg
Times2
The haves and have yachts
Britain's 'merely rich' (GBP500,000-plus a year) are struggling to keep
up in a world increasingly dominated by the super-rich (too many
millions to count), reports SARAH VINE
It is parents' evening at one of West London's more sought-after
nursery schools. This is where the infants of some of the most
successful people in Britain -- bankers, lawyers, accountants -- spend
their mornings, at a cost of roughly GBP1,800 a term. It may seem a lot
of money for a bit of finger-painting, but among London's high-earners
this nursery is acknowledged as one of the best of its kind, an
excellent grounding (social and otherwise) for any of the private
primary schools that thrive in the area. And besides, GBP1,800 a term
is a mere bagatelle compared to what's in store: GBP3,500-plus a term
for primary education; easily twice that at secondary level.
It's all very convivial. Elegantly dressed mothers tuck their Anya
Hindmarches under their arms and whip out diaries to check availability
for future play-dates. Meanwhile, the fathers hoover up sausage rolls
and reach gamely for their wallets when the charity box comes round
(this year it's Africa, last year it was the tsunami). There is much
interest in City bonuses, which are imminent. People are naturally
cagey about their own circumstances, but there is general wonderment
being expressed at the sums involved, which are truly stratospheric.
According to the Centre for Economics and Business Research, a
staggering GBP8.8 billion will be paid out in this next round, with
more than 4,200 individuals receiving more than GBP1 million each. Much
of that money (around GBP5 billion) will find its way into property,
half of it in London; and of the overall bonus, between 60 and 70 per
cent will go to non-UK residents -- ie, foreign nationals working in
London, many of whom will not be liable for UK tax.
Not surprisingly, this high-pressure economic climate is a hot topic
among the sticky-back plastic and the Play-Doh. Not that any of these
people wants for the price of a bottle of champagne, you understand;
indeed, some of them will almost certainly be on the receiving end of a
sizeable chunk of this year's bonus bonanza. It's just that, in today's
terms, many of them no longer occupy the very top branches of the money
tree. These people are rich -- but they are by no means super-rich.
One City banker's wife defines it thus: "It's the difference between
people who are wage slaves -- albeit well-paid wage slaves -- and those
who own actually own companies. My husband makes good money; but when
he stops, it stops." Or, as Rachel Johnston puts it so wittily it in
her recent novel Notting Hell it is the Haves versus the Have Yachts.
The Haves earn upwards of half a million pounds a year, live in houses
that are only partially mortgaged, take regular foreign holidays and
send their children to smart schools. They consist largely of
professionals and by any normal standards they would be considered
rich. The Have Yachts, however, operate at an altogether different
level. These are people who think nothing of spending several million
on a party, or having their children picked up from school by
helicopter and transported to a waiting private jet for a weekend in
Gstaad. They have so much money that they pay experts to help them
spend it -- and they could outlive us all in lavish style on just the
interest from their net assets.
The phenomenon has already been identified in America, where last month
The New York Times drew a distinction between the merely rich -- the
top 1 per cent of the population, whose annual income rests somewhere
around the $1 million mark -- and the super-rich -- those who earn
between $4.5 million and $20 million a year. There is little love lost
between the groups, with the former not only envious of the latter's
fortunes, but also resentful of the means of acquisition, with
particular distain being reserved for the 21st-Century heirs to Gordon
Gekko, hedge-fund managers.
In Britain, the economic circumstances are even more conducive to such
a vast gap opening up between what are already, by most people's
standards, vast fortunes. Not only is London the undisputed centre of
the world's markets, it also has a cultural climate that is most
congenial towards wealth, and in particular multicultural wealth. It is
also, despite recent headlines, a relatively secure place to live,
especially if, as these people do, you have little or no contact with
the real world (the super-rich never use public transport, which to
them includes taxis, or any other form of public service).
Perhaps most importantly, Britain has one of the most business-friendly
tax environments on the planet, exemplified by the non-domicile (or
"non-dom") tax laws. In simple terms, these allow wealthy foreign
nationals to hold their main liquid assets in tax-free offshore
environments while operating freely within the UK -- largely untroubled
by the Exchequer (the same is not true of British nationals). Thanks to
the Chancellor's decision to maintain these arrangements (it was a
close call: house prices in Central London took a considerable dip in
2004 when "non-dom" was last under serious review; but a sustained
campaign from the City and the Exchequer persuaded him to relent),
London's status as the place to make and take money has only been
reinforced in recent years.
So who are these super rich, and why is their presence such a slap in
the face for the merely rich (or should that be the formerly rich --
wealth is, after all, relative)? The magazine Spear's Wealth Management
Survey, established with the express intention of catering to the
high-end needs of the lavishly moneyed, identifies them as ultra
high-net-worths (UHNW) -- individuals with more than GBP15 million to
invest.
These people are all about capital. While the merely rich rely on their
salaries to maintain cash-flow and use bonus windfalls to offset
mortgage debt, annual income and daily expenditure are largely
irrelevant to the super-rich. Sure, they might scratch their heads a
bit before buying another private jet; but otherwise their strong
capital base ensures that there is very little that is outside their
financial reach.
Even more annoying for the merely rich is the fact that UHNWs are not
that interested in that hitherto buoyant London stock, social cachet
(as defined by Tatler), since they operate in a refined sphere of their
own making. So the accepted currency of upper-class life -- schools,
old boys' networks, university dining clubs, titles -- are of little or
no value to them. "A lot of the resentment comes from the fact that
having been rather swanky, we are now effectively irrelevant," says one
City (Eton, Oxford) fund manager. "These people are powerful, arrogant,
confident. They're like the aristocracy used to be -- and we are the
equivalent of the old county set, in their eyes somewhat impoverished
and a bit pathetic.
"Not only do they look down on us, they have made our lives more
uncomfortable from a financial point of view too, by pushing up the
price of traditional wealth assets -- school fees, house prices,
staff." The merely rich are struggling to keep up, and so the divide
widens. As one head-hunter put it: "The great anxiety of very rich
people is going to stay with someone less rich and discovering that the
standard of staffing is not the same as at home. So they don't."
The effect on housing prices at the very top end of the market has been
astonishing. Ed Mead, a director at the estate agents Douglas and
Gordon, explains. "In Central London the battle is unquestionably
between the City bonus types and the super-rich foreigners -- and there
is no doubt who is winning. Between 70 to 80 per cent of our top deals
are with foreign nationals. It's because London is such a money magnet.
"Next year, for example, Goldman Sachs is relocating 1,100 people here
from the US. In the past three years, 398 big international firms have
moved to London. We are talking Indians, Russians, Chinese, Italians .
. . you name it. Even what I would call the new Russian middle-classes
are beginning to invest here. Not much -- GBP200,000 to GBP300,000
flats -- but it still has an impact. They want their kids at school
here, see. But what is really going to exacerbate the problem for the
ordinary rich -- or the native rich -- is that these buyers are likely
to hold on to their properties for a generation. Traditionally, top-end
property has come back on the market every four to five years; but now
these people will not sell again for 25." And it's not just London
prices they're inflating. When the late Patrick Lichfield's villa in
Mustique came up for sale recently, its asking price was an already
outrageous GBP6 million (it is, by all accounts, a perfectly pleasant
proposition, but nothing spectacular). Then a small skirmish broke out
between several bidders, and in the end it sold for a reported GBP14
million. On any other Caribbean island it would have fetched GBP1
million, tops.
With schools, it's a similar thing. Places that used to be full of
lolloping Sloanes in second-hand uniforms are now populated
increasingly by tidy foreign children, most of them frighteningly
bright. As one mother put it: "They are all at the very least
bilingual." This cosmopolitan turn irritates the merely rich, whose
budgets do not stretch to second homes in Paris or Madrid and whose
erstwhile perfectly charming Cotswold retreats now look positively
paltry by comparison.
"And they're so obvious," she continues. "The nannies always do
drop-off because it's quicker -- but at pick-up there's much more
loitering so they're all there, with their tinted windows and expensive
clothes. It's all very showy. In the old days, truly grand people had
shabby luggage. This lot are all shiny new. Some of them even have
bespoke Valextra luggage -- in the signature cream, of course, so you
can only use it if you own a private jet. Class doesn't matter any
more: it's money that counts."
Having such vast sums of money presents other challenges -- such as
what to do with it all. Like over-indulged rock stars, the super-rich
have an army of professionals only too willing to indulge their every
whim -- at a price, naturally. At Quintessentially, the global
concierge service, their "elite" membership is by invitation only and
costs a basic GBP24,000 a year. For that, members have access to
finders and fixers in every major city across the world, 24 hours a
day. The most popular demand is for property (what a surprise), both in
London and outside, in particular by the sea (Devon, Dorset, Cornwall
-- no wonder the locals can't find anywhere to live).
But there have been some more unusual requests: finding a premiership
footballer to play with a members' son; sourcing 12 albino peacocks for
a party with just three hours' notice; completely redesigning a London
hotel room; and organising a trip to Hudson Bay, Canada, during the one
month each year when the world's largest concentration of polar bears
gathers on the ice. Aaah.
So they're not all heartless heathens, as a recent Red Cross charity
gala proved. The assembled throng of super-rich potential benefactors
turned up their noses at the array of "luxury" auction prizes
(including several GBP10,000 holidays on private islands with hot and
cold running staff) because, of course, they already had them all. But
when asked by the auctioneer to come up with the money for four new
ambulances, at a cost of GBP50,000 each, they stumped up in a jiffy.
Very laudable -- until you remember that for these people writing a
cheque for GBP10,000 is about as much of a hardship as me handing a Big
Issue salesman a GBP2 coin -- and telling him to keep the change.
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