Stephen McGinty: Why the jerks will always be with us

IN the comedy, The Jerk, Steve Martin plays Navin R. Johnston, a poor black sharecropper's son who never dreamed he was adopted. By dint of extreme luck and a smidgeon of entrepreneurial skill, he rises from a wooden shack to a mansion in Beverly Hills courtesy of the success of the Opti-grab, a device that clips onto a pair of glasses to stop them sliding down one's nose, while also offering a convenient handle with which they can be removed and refitted.

Sadly, no sooner has the device boomed than the business goes bust, for customers distracted by the Opti-grab go cross-eyed, leading to the death of a stunt-driver.

Johnston is evicted from his mansion in a bathrobe and whatever possessions he can grab, including a gold-leaf dining chair and a paddle-ball.

On the pavement, he utters a line touched with genius: "It's not the money I'll miss. It's all the stuff." This has been a week of "stuff", the perfect catch-all phrase for the goodies only the bounty of wealth can provide, and "stuff" doesn't come any higher, or pricier, than the apartments at One Hyde Park in London, the most expensive in the world, where a penthouse sold for 120 million. It is fitted with a range of accoutrements including a "panic room" where, in the event of an attempted kidnapping. the super-rich can go to quiver in fear.

As one article said: "the super-rich, are, for various reasons, often very scared people", which certainly made me feel better at the current absence of a yacht from my life.

The other "stuff" were those cut-backs listed by the blogger Austerity Mum, who sought to give an honest insight into the reality of the British recession. So what were they? The M&S 10 dinner for two; a choice bottle of wine or that weekly trip to the cinema, well, not quite. The "stuff" that had to go was the family holiday in the Maldives - replaced by yet another week at the family villa in France; helicopter transfers and hand-made shirts for her husband, who, it turned out was the head of PricewaterhouseCoopers City consulting business.

As Mrs Unwin sheepishly told the Daily Telegraph: "It doesn't look good, does it?"

Well, it depends. As Mr Osborne said, we're all in this together and it could be described as an economy of scale, or the scale of her family's economy. And then, to top it off, I read about the "stuff" of choice for the affluent of Asia: a Smart car studded with Swarovski crystals.

The question is: what to do with the rich? It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and not Lemmy from Motorhead, who first suggested we eat them, and to be fair, it was only as a last resort. In the days when corpulence was a sign of wealth they may have made a tasty repast, but not today when personal trainers on 100 an hour have reduced them to whippets, with many of the women but skin and bones with nary a nibble between them.

So, after Rousseau's suggestion we have Dennis Healy who suggested taxing them "until the pips squeak", but if that didn't happen under the leadership of a son of the manse who as a child was told he could have all the money in his father's wallet, only to discover it was empty, what hope the Bullingdon boys and Master Nick Clegg, who all arrived in power as millionaires?

No, I think the thing to do with the rich may be unpopular with many, but necessary; we simply have to accept them, for the rich, like the poor, will always be with us.

In fact, according to the latest issue of the Economist we are wading hip-deep in the wealthy. We're having to push them and their pink chords and hand-stitched tassel loafers away with sticks. For if you accept the definition of "rich" as possessing $1 million in investable assets there are now 10 million in the world and if you widen the scale to net assets including homes and art work, there are 24.2 million, or roughly more millionaires than Australians.

Unfortunately, the former, particularly in a recession, can be more annoying than the latter as they induce that particularly ugly emotion of envy. So how should we deal with our covetous nature towards our more affluent neighbours?

First, we need to step back and take a pin to the ballooning myth that the rich are somehow different from us. Yes, indeed, they are have more money, but, for the moment, set this aside. So if they are like us they will most likely fail to appreciate what they have.

For instance, if you have a 5m apartment at One Hyde Park, the chances are you are jealous of the person with the 7m apartment. If you have a 100m apartment, then the green-eyed monster will tug your eye up towards the man in the penthouse. The key problem is our incessant need to compare ourselves to our neighbours.

Dr Chris Boyce, at Warwick University, found that a rise in income would only make a person happier if their wealth now exceeded their friends and colleagues, as he explained: "earning 1m a year appears not to be enough to make you happy if you know your friends earn 2m a year."

The inverse is also true. Let us imagine you are in the gutter, homeless and hungry, struggling for your next meal and someone rolls by in a car on route to a warm home and a full fridge in even the most modest neighbourhood, you couldn't help but be envious and imagine their live to be content, free of stress, and stacked with happiness. And yet, that is us; almost every person reading this newspaper is to the starving and poorest of the poor the equivalent of a billionaire. But are we endlessly wrapped in a blanket of gratitude for what we do have? No, often we are brooding on what we don't. So why should it be any different a few floors up?

How do we know the rich are as unhappy as we? Well, in America they now have their own self-help group called Tiger 21, where membership is restricted to those individuals with $10 million or more of investable assets. It's where you can go and in a non-judgemental atmosphere discuss your fears that your daughter is turning into Paris Hilton.

For the fact is we can all live richly and the philosopher A.C. Grayling describes how: "People who live in relatively peaceful and stable parts of the world, who eat regularly and keep warm in winter, and who have many opportunities to exercise their human needs for creativity, enjoyment, friendship and the acquisition of knowledge, are very privileged historically speaking.

"It means that they have the chance, if only they will take it, to be genuinely happy - providing they also work to try to make happier those who are less fortunate than themselves: for happiness cannot be complete if it co-exists with indifference to those who do not share it."

If we don't listen to this then all of us, regardless of income, are jerks.