The Wit’s Guide to The Rich

Or, stealthy wealthy

The subjects of Marinus van Reymerswaele's The Moneychanger and His Wife (1539) keep their eyes on the prize, their brains on the gains, and their stares on their shares.

The rich are different from you and me — or are they? When we talk about the rich these days, there’s an effortless segue into talking about billionaires. Those guys are rich! But consider that the median individual income in both the U.S. and Canada is around $45,000. (That’s in each country’s currency, but when you adjust for purchasing power, it’s still about even. Amusingly, the economics professor who did this math is my next-door neighbour.) If you make more than that, you’re in the top half. And we’re not even considering how that ranks globally! And if you make much more than that, well, there might be a word for your status. That word is likely only “middle class” in the Lake Wobegon sense, where all the children are above average.

“Someday I want to be rich. Some people get so rich they lose all respect for humanity. That’s how rich I want to be.”
— Rita Rudner

It’s a common misconception that the rich have more stuff than the unrich, as per the obnoxious bumper sticker “He who dies with the most toys wins.” In fact, the rich have the freedom to embrace minimalism because they can always buy an umbrella if it rains. The unrich need to hold onto that broken umbrella, just in case. Or as A.A. Gill put it in an essay about his luggage, “The rich travel with nothing because they own everything. The poor travel with everything because that’s all they own.”

“When Croesus tells you he got rich through hard work, ask him ‘Whose?’”
— Don Marquis

In the movie Project Hail Mary, there was a throwaway line that stuck in my craw. (Thankfully, I have a newsletter into which I regularly empty the contents of said craw.) Ryan Gosling’s character says, “You know, Carl, when Stratt said she was sending a jet, I thought you meant like a PJ or something.” Why does this hard-working science teacher use an abbreviation for private jet? Either it doesn’t fit the character, or, worse, it’s assumed to be common knowledge. Why must we all know the vernacular of the ultra-rich? I enjoyed Succession more than the next guy but I don’t talk like one of the Roys, yeah?

“It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.”
— Logan Pearsall Smith

There’s a fascinating new book out by Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick, the latter of whom is, based on his recent Planet Money appearance, a certifiable wit. In The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There, they talk about the stealthy wealthy, also known as the middlegarchs. These decamillionaires own car dealerships, dental clinics, and frozen mini quiche companies. If you’re wondering whether there’s taxation chicanery afoot, you already know the answer.

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
— Anatole France

But the detail that stuck with me from John Lanchester’s writeup of the book in The New Yorker was this:

We all know people who are laid-back, curious about lots of different things, and have a good work-life balance. These small-business owners are not like that. They tend toward monomania. Their days are, in Zidar and Zwick’s words, “full, busy, and mundane.” They usually own only one business, and they dedicate themselves to it unrelentingly, with few outside interests or hobbies, a high tolerance for risk, and little appetite for work-life balance.

So yes, the rich are different, not just because they have more money but because they are laser-focussed on keeping it. Lose the focus, lose the money, QED. Or as Evelyn Waugh described a character in Put Out More Flags, “he was misanthropic and gifted with that sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.”

---

“What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the matter with the rich is uselessness.”
— George Bernard Shaw

When I went digging for observations about the rich, I found plenty of British ones from the olden days — and those are very different people. Back then the idle rich with inherited wealth were widely hated, even by themselves. The past is a different country, especially in a different country. And for next week?

---

Approximately each month, my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. This week, let me thoroughly endorse Matt Johnson’s movie Tony. This biopic of Anthony Bourdain maintains a tight focus on one pivotal time in the subject’s life, as all good biopics do, and features wonderful performances throughout. But the thing I loved most was how the uniquely hilarious Johnson flavour that defined Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, the verbose and self-effacing comedy that I think of as distinctly Toronto, is here in full effect. Most importantly, it works.

Here’s the opening line of the film, spoken by a young Bourdain as he pitches his proposal for a writing fellowship to three tweedy professor types. It sounds like something Matt would say in Nirvanna, it immediately captures the young Tony, and it made me laugh out loud in the cinema:

Okay, so I’m just gonna walk you through the basic vision of the story, and you guys feel free to chime in whenever you want, okay?
So, what I’m trying to do is create a metaphorical conversation between George Orwell and Jack Kerouac, as if Down and Out in Paris and London was typed out on one long piece of paper.
Snappy. Splenetic. High velocity.
At its core, it’s a building’s Roman [wonderfully mispronounced], but not in the sad Salinger, smoking, woman-hating way.
It’s hopeful.
And I know I put it on my application, but in terms of timeline, I’d want to have the first draft done by July. Then submit for notes from this esteemed troika, do a quick polish, and hopefully spend the rest of my summer in a state of “boketto.” That’s what the Japanese say when you gaze out in the distance without thinking about anything in particular.

Get Wit Quick No. 380 was snappy, splenetic, and high-velocity, but what else is new. The mascot of this newsletter is Magnus the magpie, who can never hoard quite enough shiny things. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now and still free sloppelganger is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Tap the ❤️ below; I tally them like a middlegarch counts her quiches.