The Secrets to Prosperity
And the Games People Play

The rich and powerful have hoarded the secrets to prosperity for centuries, and these secrets are only now being made available for the rest of us to adopt into our own wealth creation plans.

In any society, humans look to the wealthy and powerful as sources of admiration and inspiration, to emulate and to set as benchmarks for who we should be. We do this with movie stars – especially in places like the United States where royalty does not have a place in the class hierarchy. We mimic the behavior and tastes of the rich and powerful and adopt their priorities as our own, sometimes without even realizing it. Everything from the cars we drive to the apartments or houses we live in to the gadgets we buy and the clothes we wear reflect our hunger to live as close to wealthy as we can within our means.

The proliferation of Romance languages illustrates the historical significance of wealth emulation. For centuries BC, Classical Latin was taught in elitist circles by private tutors and expensive universities. By the 5th Century AD, Romance languages such as Italian, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese had sprung out of the attempts of various tribes to mimic how they thought Latin should sound, because they could not expose themselves to enough of the classical version to pass it on accurately to the lower classes. Each of these new languages was an offshoot of a regional dialect of something called Vulgar Latin.

We also emulate the upper classes by adopting their causes as our own, and allowing them to recruit us. In the 16th Century, an entire religious denomination sprung out of Henry VIII's wish to divorce his wife. The Tudor family (King Henry along with his two daughters, Queens Mary I and Elizabeth I) took human lives on either sides of that issue. The battles eventually became about religious, political and moral principles that were important enough to die for, but the core reason that the king wanted to defect from Catholicism was not a matter of life and death – it was a personal indulgence that he was savvy enough to cause other people to get emotional about and take up on his behalf.

Emulation is only one way that those with the secrets to prosperity exert their influence on society. Another way is their skill in preserving their socioeconnomic "wins" through the zero sum game (i.e., "I lose if you win") approach to wealth preservation. Once society has determined who is worthy of a societal power, the "winners" then stack the game in their favor and in favor of their families and close allies.

Western society's upper classes have set up high physical barriers to class mobility that seem uncomfortably similar to caste systems. Examples of these barriers include the institution of peerage, which assigns ranks to people associated with nobility (dukes, barons, etc.) and bestows preferences upon them to certain social goods and services. These preferences contradict all principles of meritocracy.

Similar barriers are drawn by the highly educated classes (they typically go hand in hand with wealth and power) in the form of tough standards for acceptance into gifted academic programs, elite colleges and profesional guilds for high paying professions such as law and medicine.

Want more examples? How about family preferences (nepotism) and favoritism toward the well connected in business? More subtle barriers are exclusionary standards such as gated communities and self-selecting organizations such as country and athletic clubs that reinforce the negative self–image of the poor and lower-middle class.

Once walls have been raised around these elites, their secrets to prosperity and success brew and expand far away from public ears.

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