Monday, Mar. 07, 2011

The Wealth Report

On his Wall Street Journal blog the Wealth Report, Robert Frank writes with neither fear nor favor about a relatively tiny but endlessly fascinating tribe: the very, very rich. He covers everything from tax policy to — well, here, read it for yourself: "The bride's family gave the groom a Bell 429 helicopter." (That's from a reported $20 million wedding in India.) Another sentence worth rereading: "One thing I have noticed about rich people is that they are insomniacs." Frank neither panders nor sneers. What he does is poke beneath the veneer and show that, contrary to the cliché, the rich really aren't so different from you and me. They're just a lot richer.

Dubner is an award-winning journalist and the co-author, along with Steven Levitt, of the best-selling economics book Freakonomics and a blog of the same name.