Larry Samuel has long followed the rich. In 2000, JP Morgan hired him to do what he calls “a sort of anthropological study of wealth culture.” He repeated his study – dubbed “Wealthology” – again five years later, after the burst of the dot-com bubble and the rise of the hedge fund, segmenting his subject by age, residence, gender. For his new book, Rich: The Rise and Fall of American Wealth Culture, he took a historical tack on the same subject. “We’re so fascinated with the wealthy elites, and are so caught up in the moment right now with the crash, that I wanted to put things in perspective and say we’ve been through this before. The rich will survive,” Samuel said. “When we bounce back, there will be an even bigger and faster way to make money.” Below, Samuel discusses when the rich became “the rich,” why wealth culture is on the wane, and why Americans love money but seem to hate the rich.

Q. Why begin with the 1920s? What happened then to launch wealth culture as we know it?

A. There have always been rich people, but it’s a clean break. That’s the beginning of the democratization of American wealth culture. Everything changes after World War I, because the stock market becomes accessible to anybody with some money to invest, which hadn’t happened before. You have this new kind of rich American, benefiting from the economic boom and the stock market. I draw a break from the Gilded Age and the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers, which has been well-covered by historians. But no one has traced the history of almost the last 100 years of the rich. That’s the demise of old money and the rise of wealth culture as we know it, the new money, which is just about how much money you have.

Q. Who counts as rich today? Is it purely monetary or is it a way of being?

A. It is just monetary. It used to be a way of life, a set of elites with particular behaviors and attitudes. That’s pretty much extinct right now. The idea of class is almost just about how many dollars you have. We’ve lost something. I’m not going to defend it – they weren’t always great people, but they were interesting. They had an identity, a culture. For some reason the term “millionaire” still has a lot of cultural currency. That word amazes me. It continues to resonate even though it doesn’t really qualify you as rich today, because so many people have more.

In my study, it was $5 million net worth. But in my book, the terms “wealthy” and “rich” change so much over the years, so I just used my sources’ definitions. Even the concept of a millionaire has changed. At one time it meant a million dollars in net worth; at other times it meant you made a million dollars per year. In the 1930s, if you earned $50,000 a year you were a “millionaire.”

Q. You mentioned that we no longer have an old-moneyed elite class with particular behaviors. Is there still anything that could be considered a wealth culture, or are there just rich people?

A. I don’t think there’s just rich people. I also don’t think there’s a wealth culture, or at least it’s much weaker than we knew. The social signifiers of elitism, which were really the signifiers of wealth culture – a sense of entitlement, having titles, being discreet and snobbish, having noblesse oblige – that’s essentially gone. That isn’t to say there isn’t some culture around rich people. What [wealth] does is it gives people the opportunity to do what they want in life. You have more access to things and experiences, and you’re buying the ultimate form of wealth, which is time. You can hire people. Rich people have entire staffs, little corporations. If you have that kind of money, it’s a great privilege. You can spend time the way you want to, rather than working for a living and doing things you don’t want to do. That’s what being rich in America is about right now.

Q. How are the American rich distinct in the world? What is wealth culture elsewhere like?

A. There has been tremendous blurring over the years. Again, since the 1920s, as far back as then, we’ve become a much less isolated country. World War I brought us onto a global stage, lots of Europeans came here then. It just keeps accelerating, and there’s very little difference right now [between the wealthy in different countries]. I don’t think you could tell much difference between a Moscow millionaire and certain American millionaires. In the book I talk about the “thrillionaires,” it’s one of the archetypes I identify. The Russian thrillionaires are the ultimate thrillionaires – spending a lot, living large, and Russians are now outdoing the Americans. I really subscribe to the Thomas Friedman idea that the world is flat, so I’m not sure there’s much difference now. The lines have really blurred.

Q. Can you tell me more about the archetypes of wealthy people you mentioned? Are they still valid today?

A. I came up with this theory back in 2000, and checked and made sure the archetypes were still valid in 2005 and 2006. I haven’t updated the study again – I would love to during the recession. I would argue they’re still valid. I didn’t want to segment the American rich by how much money they had. I look at it according to their behavior: how they’re spending their time and money, rather than, like most marketing research, their opinions and attitudes. I don’t do that. I just track them. I’m the fly on the wall. And I sorted them into these five buckets.

One group are thrillionaires, they want to make a lot of money, they want to spend a lot of money. They’re driven by hedonistic pleasures. These are the Richard Bransons, the Donald Trumps. They see their money as something to use. Another group is called “coolionaires,” who are about beauty and buying art and the opera. They structure their lives around aesthetics. There is some overlap with thrillionaires, but to them their wealth is meant to signify that they are people of sophistication and refinement. By the way, a lot of people are combinations, it’s rare to be one archetype. You have a primary and a secondary and maybe a tertiary archetype.

There’s the “realionaire,” the millionaire next door. These folks don’t care about the trappings of wealth at all, they’re not caught up in spending a lot to express status. They’ve made their money and they’ve shown they’ve succeeded in life. They look at life as a game: they’re the winners if they made the money, but they don’t necessarily want to show it off. They will spend a lot of money on things they value like an Ivy League education for their children. They’re not going to buy a Rolls Royce.

Then the “wellionaries” – they’re about wellness. They want to look good, feel good, think positive. They’re a little New-Age-y. They want to evolve as human beings and reach higher goals. Like Maslov’s Hierarchy, this is Larry’s Hierarchy, as I immodestly call it. They use their money to live a life in balance, to go to a yoga retreat in Costa Rica.

The last is the “willionaires.” These folks are all about leaving a legacy. They realize that it’s basically better to give than to receive. They want to enable others to live well. It’s a way to live forever. If you enable someone, a young person, to do something she wants to do in life, that’s a great thing. If they want to leave a mark physically, like a hospital wing or foundation, that’s also a way to live forever. We’re all going to die, but your money can be perpetual in some way. They’re aware of that.

That’s the ultimate level. I did this study in 2000 and redid it in 2006. I went back and found that a lot of the same people had evolved. Thrillionaires move up to wellionaires. They’d made more money and they had over time evolved as people. I concluded that it wasn’t just these five groups. Part of the theory is that there’s an evolutionar process, and people are marching up this ladder.

Q. Though you haven’t studied it, can you speculate how wealth culture is changing during the recession?

A. I’m trying to find someone who would sponsor me to go out for six months and find this out. But just anecdotally, I’m seeing that these archetypes still exist, but I think they’re diminished somewhat. Money is something to spend, you express your identity with it, and if you have less money or a third less money – and these folks did lose 30% of their net worth on average – you don’t express your identity as much. If you’re a coolionaire, you’re buying as much art or any art. You’re less of a coolionaire, but you’re still a coolionaire in terms of your values and identity. But you’re expressing it at a less expensive level. Instead of buying a piece, you’re going to a gallery. The wellionaire isn’t going to this fabulous yoga retreat in Costa Rica. He or she is going to the local gym or health club.

Q. How trendy is wealth culture? How much do we want to mimic it, and how has that changed over time, and since the latest recession hit? Is it changing?

A. I think it is changing, there’s finally a reality check. We go through these cycles, we went through it in the 1930s, in the 1970s, and now we’re doing it again. It comes up every generation or so. There is a reality check and people reevaluate the very American ideal of wanting to be rich, which goes back to Tocqueville’s observation in the 1830s. It’s just part of the American dream; it’s built into our DNA. Money. It’s in our founding, it’s all based on economics. When we go through these cycles, we ask is it really all about money? Is this really what I should be doing? Should I be trying to get rich? I think that’s a really good thing. There are other things in life. Even wealthy people are reconsidering their values and whether or not they’re getting the most meaning out of life. I think during the flush times we get caught up in the idea that it’s a competition to get our share of the pie, and it’s hard to resist that.

The first thing to go is luxury. I’m very negative about luxury. People realize you don’t need all these shiny objects. There are other things that have more value than the $6,000 Hermes Kelly bag or whatever it costs. Your priorities really start to change. There is a silver lining in the meltdown we’ve had.

Q. You mentioned that it’s part of the American way of life to want to be wealthy, but we also have an uneasy relationship with wealth – we don’t like the rich, we act less rich than we are. Can you discuss this tension, and have we always had it?

A. That’s historical too. We’ve always had an ambivalent relationship with the wealthy. It’s a love-hate relationship. We’re sort of envious of them and we admire them because they are the purest expression, the realization of the American dream, the Horatio Alger myth, they’ve made it. The myth that it’s a self-made person, too, is generally true. There isn’t a lot of inherited wealth anymore. The tech boom really was emblematic of that. They didn’t inherit anything.

So we’re envious and jealous, and with that, we’re a little distasteful of them as well, because they have more than us, and they tend not to share it always. We demand that they give back, and we’re angry at them when they don’t. For example, Bill Gates, for quite a few years in the 90s, was the richest man and he wasn’t giving back. He said he would do it later in life, and there was great pressure on him. I believe Paul Saffo said if [Gates’] mother were alive she would paddle him….

We demand they give back, and that goes back to the Judeo-Christian ethic of tithing, giving 10% a year. It’s all wrapped up with Christianity and the idea that the love of money is the root of all evil. Which is different from the idea that money is the root of all evil – people tend to mistake that. Love of money is the root. Money’s okay, but if you love it too much, that’s sort of evil. You’re not seeing the full picture.