PREMIUM SEARCH Search by job title, geography and build a list of executive contacts
It's getting really vicious on the ski slopes of Colorado. Call it survival of the richest. How do I know? I tried out cross-country skiing for the first time over the holiday break in Aspen and ran smack into that quintessential American dynamic, social mobility, at 10,000 to 12,000 feet.
One of the key characteristics of the New Economy, driven by high-tech growth, is that it shakes up the class system, opening opportunities for people to move up -- or down. The good news, of course, is that more and more folks at the bottom tier of American society are beginning the march upward, thanks to four years of fast noninflationary growth. Immigrants, welfare moms, minorities, teens are all doing much better in the job market. Many are getting their first real jobs, with benefits.
But what about at the top of the mountain? Here's what I saw there. Trust-fund babies, living off their parents' old money that was derived from industrial-age activities (manufacturing, oil, steel), are being pushed out by dot.com millionaires creating their wealth in the Information Age. An army of new Net-rich 20- and 30-year olds, dripping with disdain for the "I don't work, I'm evolving" crowd, is taking over in the Centennial State. And since mobility is a relative thing, the old rich are downwardly mobile vis a vis the newbie strivers.
HOLDING HIGH GROUND.
No one should be crying over this, but when you see it up close, it's a fascinating social tableau that Thorstein Veblen, author of The Theory of the Leisure Class, might appreciate.
The mechanism of displacement is property. The dot.comers have so much more money than the trust-funders that they're bidding up the price of prime ski property. They're capturing the very heights of Colorado's best ski country -- tops of hills, good views over the meadows -- and elbowing the old money out. Land prices have doubled or even tripled over the past two years. And as land prices soar, people are putting up bigger and more expensive houses. Trust-funders tended to have houses of 2,000 to 3,000 square feet. Dot.comers are paying up to $400 a square foot for fancy contractors to construct edifices of much higher grandeur.
Unlike the trust-funders, the dot.comers are wealth generators not wealth dissipators
The trust-funders are, of course, better skiers than the dot.comers. They've been on the slopes much longer, thanks to Mommy's and Daddy's money. But dot.comers clearly have the dough to get the best lessons and the best equipment. Just like ex-Netscape founder billionaire Jim Clark is shaking up the world of ocean yachting with his super-high-tech boat, my guess is that the dot.comers will rev up skiing, too.
O.K., as you can probably tell by now, I'm rooting for the dot.comers. For one thing, they're wealth generators, not wealth dissipators. Even on the slopes, they appear to be constantly working, talking all the time about broadband, wireless data, and the next iternation of the Internet revolution. At 10,000 feet, it's easy to feel exhilirated, but these people are clearly getting high from creating, building, and expanding new companies, new products, and -- best of all for them -- new market capital. (Sure, tech stocks have been taking a beating in the early days of the New Millennium, but don't forget that the Nasdaq was up 86% last year!)
ON THE MOVE.
For the better part of the past 25 years, income inequality widened in America. Slow growth and high unemployment kept millions of people out of the labor market, and most of the rest of country just treaded water. Lots of people working in corporations were downsized, some right out of the middle class.
The inequality gap isn't much better today, though it has narrowed a bit in the last two years. Meanwhile, the number of millionaires has gone from 4 million in 1991 to 9 million today. But inequality matters much less when everyone is moving up. That's the true miracle of the New Economy -- growth and opportunity. High-tech investments and global trade have created an economy where all the classes in America appear to be on the move.
The productive classes are moving upward, a few to the very top of the hill. Pushing aside the trust-fund babies, to my way of thinking, is just icing on the capitalist cake.
When not observing the rich on the slopes of Colorado, Nussbaum is editorial page editor for Business Week EDITED BY DOUGLAS HARBRECHT
Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.
Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed.
Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video.
To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here.
Copyright 2000 , by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
Printer-Friendly Version
