RAGGED THOTS

You might not weep for the mergers-and-acquisition man maddened by the size of an even richer hedge fund manager's yacht, but his trauma is a symptom of a syndrome that has spread far beyond Greenwich, Connecticut. Above a certain level, wealth, and the status that flows from it, is more a matter of relatives than absolutes. The less dramatically affluent alphas that make up the core of Penn's professionals--lawyers, journalists, corporate types, academics, senior civil servants, and the like--suddenly found themselves over the last decade not just overshadowed by finance's new titans but actually priced out of many things they view as the perks of their position: private schools, second homes, and so on. I doubt they enjoyed the experience.

Well educated, articulate and, by any usual measure, successful, they had been reduced to betas--and thus, politically, to a glint in Obama's eye. The decades of prosperity had swollen their numbers, but shrunk their status and their security. Their privileges were mocked or dismantled and their "good" jobs were ever more vulnerable. Wives as well as husbands now had to work, and not just down at the church's charity store either, a change that is more resented than Stepford's children would generally like to admit. Even so, things they felt should have been theirs by rights were still out of reach or, perhaps worse, graspable only by heavily leveraged hands. In a boom-time (July 2006) piece for Vanity Fair, Nina Munk interviewed two women amongst "the worn carpet and faded chintz" of Greenwich's old guard Round Hill Club. They told her how everything had gone downhill, "no one can afford to live here--all our kids are moving to Darien or Rowayton because it's cheaper."

It's a mark of the pressure to keep up that, as Frank noted, in 2004, 20 percent of "Lower Richistanis," those 7.5 million households (the number would be lower now, but it then would have constituted roughly 6-7 percent of the U.S. total) struggling along on a net worth of $1 million to $10 million, spent more than they earned. These poor souls will have included the most prosperous of Penn's professionals, but in an age of "mass luxury" and almost unlimited credit, the compulsion to do whatever it took not to be trumped by the Joneses spread to their less affluent cohorts, with the devastating consequences that were finally visible to all by the middle of last year.

Meanwhile, here is the complete text of the speech the judge gave with the controversial line that has some people -- including a certain former boss of mine -- calling Sotomayor a racist. Read the full speech yourself. It may not win any awards for eloquence, but I think the broader argument that she makes -- that it is impossible for a judge (or, arguably, anyone) to completely divorce one's experiences when making a decision -- is actually a fair one. Sotomayor concludes, however, that it is better to be aware of all of those biases -- or baggage, one might say -- when bringing them to the task at hand. And, yes, that means working within the law to come to correct decision.

Anyway, that's how I read it. I wouldn't call her a racist, though her view on how much of a role experience might/would/should play in decision-making is a more than reasonable line of inquiry for a Republican -- or any -- senator to pursue in confirmation hearings. As for Newt, of all people, he should know better than to take one line out of a speech and make a complete assertion about someone's mindset. Remember, "wither on the vine," Newt? That was a line in a speech where he said that he thought the Health Care Financing Administration bureaucracy running Medicare needed to be gotten rid of.

That, of course, ended up getting reported as Gingrich -- and, by extension, Republicans as a whole -- wanted Medicare to "wither on the vine." Funny how context matters.