• KEN HALL REPORTS: Lesson from 'Gatsby': Rich are still different

  • Let's talk about the rich and how they are different from the rest of us.
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    If you've been to the movies, you know that "Gatsby," the latest version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel "The Great Gatsby," opens next week.
    You'd think that a book that has been on class reading lists almost since it was published in 1925, a book long considered one of the greatest novels of all time, would already be on most bookshelves.
    But buyers are lining up to get a copy, bringing predictions that it could be among the top-selling books of the year.
    That means people will be discussing not just whether Leonardo DiCaprio makes a better Gatsby than Robert Redford but also what the story means.
    For that, I'll turn to a familiar source, "Spark-notes." Gatsby might seem to be about thwarted love, the study guide says, but Fitzgerald was writing about "the disintegration of the American dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material excess."
    That sounds familiar.
    And it was far from the only time Fitzgerald warmed to the subject. One of his most famous sayings concerned the rich. He was supposed to have told Ernest Hemingway that the rich are different from the rest of us and Hemingway was supposed to have answered that it was true because they had more money. There are other variations on the wording and participants, but the sentiments in their more complete context come from a 1926 short story, "The Rich Boy." There, Fitzgerald wrote that the rich "are different from you and me ... Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are."
    And because the 2010s are different from the 1920s, it turns out that the rich can do something to make sure they stay better.
    Recent analysis of test scores and other measures of success have shown that children of wealth are doing much better in school, not only compared with children from poor families, but also children from middle-class ones. The work at Stanford and Harvard shows that this gap is relatively recent and it comes because the wealthy have more recently devoted considerable time and effort to the crucial early learning years, the time when a child can build up an advantage that never goes away.
    This is good news. Even if parents do not have money for tutors or time from their jobs or much education to share, society can learn the lesson that putting more effort and funding into early childhood education is likely to pay off for everyone in the long term.
    And it would be good news, except that Congress just decided to put more money into easing air travel while cutting budgets for several programs to help families and children.
    Just for kicks, they cut cancer research and workplace safety money, too.
    So the rich are still different from the rest of us. And Congress is helping them stay that way.
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