Fifty-one years later, the rich are very different. It may be hard to imagine now, but for much of the 20th century, they were a relatively small, even beleaguered group: held in check in Britain and other western countries by high taxes and steadily more egalitarian social values. Today, they are an ever more dominant and international elite: lightly taxed, politically pivotal, admired as much as criticised, and so untethered from everyone else in their lifestyles that they exist in “a parallel country”, as the American investigator of the wealthy Robert Frank puts it. Since 1980, the share of national income taken by the richest 1% of Britons and Americans has almost trebled. Across the world as a whole, the 1% now have half of all the wealth, the highest proportion for almost a century. Sometimes this elite life is fleetingly visible to the rest of us – the chauffeur-driven car waiting outside a boutique in a smart part of London or New York. More often, it is invisible – the super-yacht out at sea. The 2008 financial crisis and subsequent global recession and austerity have left this life largely unaffected – and often enhanced, with emergency measures such as quantitative easing hugely benefiting the rich – while altering the lives of almost everyone else. Books and articles about the 1% have become a booming genre; many newspapers, including this one, now have “wealth correspondents” to report on the super-rich.