THE GUARDIAN: It's obviously not for the weather, so what is it about Britain that the obscenely wealthy find so attractive?
Here's something you definitely shouldn't do if you're even a tiny bit leftwing and suffer from high blood pressure: look at a document called the Forbes cost of living extremely well index. Forbes is an American business magazine, and it's cost of living extremely well index is an annual survey of price trends for things popular at the very, very top end of the income distribution. The riveting thing about the CLEWI isn't the headline attached, because that tends to be the same every year. The headline news is usually that very expensive things have gone up at a rate higher than the rate of inflation – often by as much as double. Common sense leads us not to be surprised at that, since people who don't care what stuff costs will logically not mind too much if the cost of that stuff goes up. What's gripping about the index – a basket of 40 goods and services targeting the super-rich – is the detail of what's on it.
In fact, that's always true for these indices. The fun is in the specifics. The UK Office for National Statistics publishes my favourite one. This measures inflation using a basket of goods in common use – a category that is constantly shifting, and at the moment includes mobile phone downloads, sparkling wine and long-sleeved cotton shirts. There is, in a wonky way, something moving about the close attention the resident stattos give to detailing the realities of ordinary lives; it's like a novel about British domestic life in 2012. Oven-ready joints of meat, for example, burst on to the index last year with this explanatory note: "Replaces pork shoulder joint reflecting a longer-term movement to prepared food and replacing an item which was sometimes difficult to collect since joints are sometimes only available towards the end of the week and on weekends." Someone has really thought hard about that. It's reassuring to contemplate a household that has managed to buy every single thing on the index, from hardback fiction to hair conditioner, from a provincial newspaper to women's high-heeled shoes to dried fruit (all those being new additions in 2011).
The super-rich index is made up of items that are, let's say, different. A Russian sable coat at $240,000, a facelift for $18,500, a thoroughbred yearling racehorse at $319,340, a Sikorsky helicopter at $14.8m, an arrangement of flowers changed weekly for six rooms at $98,100 or a year's tuition at Harvard at $56,652. It is, in a dark way, hilarious that a Harvard education counts as a luxury good. If all that starts getting too much, you can always decompress with a week at the Golden Door Spa in California, $6,750, or 45 minutes with an Upper East side shrink for $325. This, too, is like a novel, a novel about people whose lives are full of stuff you don't want to own and things you don't want to do. It's a novel, I find, that I don't particularly want to read. » | John Lanchester* | Friday, February 24, 2012
* John Lanchester's novel, Capital, is published on 1 March by Faber & Faber at £17.99. To order a copy for £14.39, including UK mainland p&p, visit the Guardian Bookshop.
