Chrystia Freeland Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (Allen Lane)

Chrystia Freeland's new book Plutocrats was on the bestseller rack at the bookstore in Washington's Dulles airport. It seemed impressive that this critical study of the very rich had found its way into a league typically dominated by aspirational how-to books delivering recipes for the successful life. Then, an insidious thought struck me: perhaps the book's Washington buyers thought it was a self-help book: how to be a plutocrat.

Indeed the new global super-rich, the world's top one per cent, is not a bad club to join if you can. In the United States, Freeland reports that 30 years ago the top one per cent of earners captured about 10 per cent of GDP. Now that has risen to almost a third of GDP. In 2005, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, both generous in giving away their wealth, between them were nevertheless worth about as much as the 120 million Americans who make up the poorest 40 per cent of the country.

Her style is jaunty, almost racy, as she dances lightly through income statistics, international conferences and much else that would bring a lesser prose stylist down. Here the well-placed vignette, often the naive but revealing boasts of a newly minted plutocrat, keeps the pace moving. There is no mistaking her serious purpose, however, which is to chart an economic and social phenomenon that poses real threats to cohesion and any notion of fairness in the world.

Freeland is at her most interesting when she discusses how people join the plutocrats' club. The first route is the straightforward one of having a good idea and executing it better than anybody else in the age of globalization. In the past, if your market was Britain, the US or even both, that might make you very rich. Today with globalization, when the world is your market, a global product as Gates has discovered, or savvy investing in global businesses as Buffett has done, can elevate your wealth to a stratospheric level. As Freeland observes the Gilded Age is back, and then some.

If there is a catch, it lies in the other entry route to the club: corrupt influence and access in a home market that allows national champions to grow behind the protective walls of trade barriers. The author describes examples in Russia, India and Mexico. A particularly telling one was the transparent, internationally supervised public auction of a Stalin-era steel mill in southern Ukraine. It had previously been sold to a consortium that included the then President's son-in-law. During the Orange Revolution it was reclaimed by the new government and resold for six times the original price. Of all the Soviet Union's assets sold to investors since 1991, this dowdy steel mill raised the most because all the real jewels in the Soviet crown -- mines, utilities, energy companies and banks -- passed into private hands for the most part via the murky processes of crony capitalism.

That is the political Achilles heel of the new rich: much of their money was made not on the open fields of global competition but in smoke-filled back rooms. As Freeland says, Moscow is the world's top city for billionaires. It has 78 compared to 58 in New York and a miserly 39 in London.

There is a real question about how sustainable these new fortunes are. Many are being shipped overseas to spread risk as political patrons pass on and can no longer protect business friends. Once abroad, a global lifestyle, sharing neighbourhoods in London or New York and of conferences such as Davos, sporting events, holiday spots and accessories, notably superyachts, have created an insulated elite.

Yet in the over-bearing social and political behaviour of many Plutocrats anxious to hold on to what they have may lie the seeds of their downfall.

There is a growing anger across the world about economic inequality and in many countries against its perceived handmaiden, corruption. Whether in the increasing number of protests now reported in China, the Occupy Wall Street movement, or elections in the US, Latin America, Asia or Europe, inequality is a recurrent nagging theme. There is a sense of a great unfairness in the world, both within nations but still between them. For while the global economic revolution has cut sharply into the stock of absolute poverty, lifting hundreds of millions of people above the breadline, it has in the view of most economists increased inequality.

A Spectator journalist recently complained, on behalf of old elites, about new money taking over their clubs and sporting events such as Wimbledon or Ascot. When you have made an enemy of both the world's hard-pressed middle class as well as London's High Tory Spectator magazine the tumbrils could soon follow. The re-election of President Obama who re-motivated his diverse coalition around a message of taxing the rich may be a sign of things to come.

Indeed, if Freeland's plutocrats hang on it will not be because they win wider acceptance but because the world cannot find a way of stripping them of their gains. They have often structured their wealth above the nation so the tax inspector no longer knows how to find them. When he does, they often seem to quickly escape his grip by moving tax jurisdiction or claiming non-Dom status.

In truth, the answer to rebuilding a fairer world may lie less in punitive taxes and more in spreading the benefits of education, particularly affordable high-quality university education, and the hard and soft infrastructures of roads, communications, accountable public institutions and the rule of law, allowing a broader group a bite at the cherry.

Mark Malloch-Brown, author of the Unfinished Global Revolution, is regional chairman of FTI Consulting and a former UN Deputy Secretary-General

(c) 2012 Tribune Media Services, Inc.