Is there a right way to be wealthy?

Is there a right way to be wealthy?

“In other words, the financial advice millionaires dispense onto the masses ignores basically every structural problem that keeps people poor in the first place, from poorly funded public schools to stagnating wages to being saddled with tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt. Frugality is presented as a simple position to a complicated problem — a promise that anyone who saves enough money and has the right mindset can be rich, or, at the very least, not poor.”

Increasingly, conversations about wealth have shifted from how the wealthy spend their money to whether they should have that much money to spend, and how they accumulated that wealth in the first place. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) recently called out Jeff Bezos for amassing more and more wealth while Amazon warehouse employees make so little that they qualify for public assistance.

Where some people see a frugal billionaire who should be emulated, Sanders and others see an unconscionable hoarding of a fortune built on the backs of underpaid employees.

“The implicit message on those kinds of stories is: ‘These people are good, therefore it’s okay for them to be so wealthy,’” said Sherman. “And what I argue in the book is that talking about any of this in that way avoids questions about distribution. Should they have $50 million to begin with, regardless of what they spend it on? That, to me, is a question that never comes up, partly because these representations of rich people as frugal or as spendthrifts is focused on their spending habits, not on what they have.”

When you look at India’s rich and the fawning news coverage of their lavish spending one wonders why it is so different.