An Innocent Millionaire

p. 90

The generational divide “is the plight of the lower and middle classes, whose children begin to drift away as soon as they are old enough to go to school.” Their parents can’t isolate their child and can’t control the child’s learning environment. Upper class folk can and do. They keep their kids interminably busy without exerting themselves and can control their environment totally–including their learning environment. E.g. “they can hand-pick tutors with sound views to come to the children, who may never leave the grounds their parents own, in town, in the country, by the sea, unless for an exceptionally secure boarding school or a well-chaperoned trip abroad.” The “children of the rich live under a totalitarian regime the nature of which depends on the character of the dictator.” Especially, wealthy parents “have the awesome power to disinherit. . .they are seldom told that they are too old or stupid to understand things.” A child soon learns the game and the rules. His CEO father “can bequeath him forty million or leave it all to the Cancer Fund. . . . no children of his tell him they reject his stinking material values.”