[Come to New York City if you want to probe the outer limits of fancy schmancy. The experience will raise your consciousness to the nosebleed level. I just perused the following New York magazine article in my doctor's waiting room, enhancing an already enjoyable way to spend time :)]
Don't Hate Them Because They're Rich: The trickle-down effect of ridiculous, ostentatious wealth.
By Daniel Gross
Suddenly they’re everywhere.
Not long ago, the superrich were a knowable entity -- as New Yorkers, we were on something of a last-name basis with them. There were so few of them that when we saw a Guggenheim or a Rockefeller on, say, a new hospital wing or atop a list of public-library benefactors, we felt a certain familiarity. We had at least a vague sense of who they were, what company they owned, or where their family had made all its money. And that’s as far as it went. Mostly, they stayed out of our way; the superrich were one minuscule subculture in a city that had better things to worry about.
But somewhere along the line, as great torrents of cash came pouring into Manhattan, it stopped being possible to ignore them. Never mind that the average two-bedroom apartment now costs $1.2 million. There’s a whole other stratum of wealth, where numbers have become abstract. Consider that Santiago Calatrava tower proposed last year for lower Manhattan; the entire building will be made up of $35 million apartments -- $35 million each! Five years ago, not a single apartment in the city sold for that much. Many restaurants, shops, and service industries have reoriented themselves to this new unreality, like that place that serves $700 sushi and draws a breathless crowd every night.
For most New Yorkers, this is a maddening spectacle: Who are all these people? Where did they come from? When will things return to normal?
The lament that Manhattan has become a playground of the rich is usually uttered with a sneer (or sometimes a hopeless sigh). And yes, the more rich people there are, the tougher it is for everyone else to get by, to afford apartments and live the New York life they dreamed of. How wonderful is Central Park if you live an hour away by train? It’s almost as if the superrich have cordoned off much of Manhattan for their own personal use, distancing themselves from the workaday rich and building a social class all their own.
The effects, however, are not entirely bad. This island at the center of the world is where big money from all over comes to get coddled, buffed, managed, preserved, and deployed, or simply to hang out with other money. And as the superrich have created their own ecosystem, they have also helped forge a sophisticated $488.8 billion economy, driven by highly specialized services and full of opportunity. For a city that was never blessed with great natural resources -- there are no oil reserves in Brooklyn, no veins of gold in the Bronx, and the weather sucks -- their great wealth may prove to be to New York what oil is to Saudi Arabia: a power source of seemingly inexhaustible supply that provides a huge array of jobs and other benefits for nearly everybody else. ...
<http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/culture/features/11721/>
Carl