"The Millionaire Next Door:
The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy"
By Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko
Longstreet Press, 258 pages

BY JON CARROLL | long ago -- well, four months ago, but it seems like forever -- I was assigned to hurl my large, well-formed brain into the path of onrushing bestsellers and wrestle them to the ground. I would absorb, distill, evaluate, interpret. I would fight back feelings of existential nausea using illegal recreational philosophies. And then I would report to you, the readers of Salon.

It was a dirty job, but someone had to get paid for it.

I knew that if I kept reading bestsellers long enough, I would stumble on one that was surprisingly good. If 90 percent of everything is crap, then 10 percent of everything isn't crap. I just had to wait for my number to come up.

And so it did. "The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy" by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko is modest, informative, self-possessed and free from pretension. It sets out to explain how wealthy people get that way, and it does so. The authors are academics who have been studying millionaires for 20 years. They have come up with seven common factors that they helpfully share within the first five pages of the book. They suggest that, if you pay attention to their research, you can become richer too.

This is an old hustle, of course. There are many books on the market with a similar promise. The other books talk about visualization and positive thinking. They promise that selling greeting cards, address labels, household detergents or Mexican brooms will bring you riches. They suggest that buying soybean futures or penny stocks or defaulted apartment buildings is the secret to financial security.

Stanley and Danko spit on those schemes. Indeed, they spit on the idea of "schemes." They spit on leased automobiles, heavy debt loads, Armani suits, layabout no-good sponging children and playing the stock market.

They have no opinions about higher issues. They do not attempt to make you feel good about yourself. They say: Here's how wealthy people got wealthy. They point out that 80 percent of America's millionaires are first-generation rich. You can do it if you want. Is being rich a worthy goal? Not their concern. Personal ethics is down the hall; this is the wealth accumulation room.

The prose is flat and businesslike. Their attempts at humor are lame and they seem to know it. They are never happier than when they're introducing yet another dense table that breaks down (for instance) how much their millionaires pay for shoes. (Half have never spent more than $140 in their lives.)

One of my favorite aphorisms is from Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Gilmore: "How the world works is not a secret." This book is just like that. It turns out that wealthy people are very frugal. They budget. They think about their investments carefully. They pay attention. They rarely bullshit. They're probably not much fun at parties. But they're darned rich.

None of this should be surprising. But in the overheated media atmosphere of IPOs and baby moguls and Eurotrash chic, it's quite refreshing. Honesty is sweet succor. How the world works is not a secret.

"The Millionaire Next Door" is, dare I say it, charming. It's a crap-free environment; it's whatever the opposite of New Age is. It's like sitting at dinner with someone you expect to dislike and by the end of the evening finding a sort of grudging affection for the old guy, who seems to know who he is and where he fits in the world. There are worse things.
May 9, 1997