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By | Monday, July 7, 2008

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NEW YORK

Nearly three decades of an economy less fettered by taxes, regulation and national borders has produced a crop of more than 1,000 billionaires, whose wealth and influence rival that of the robber barons a century ago. Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates and investment superstar Warren Buffett head the list of luminaries in the new gilded age and, like the Carnegies, Fords and Rockefellers before them, are using their riches to usher in a new age of philanthropy with unprecedented gifts to favored causes that do everything from developing vaccines to eradicating diseases and lifting educational standards.

Fashion designer Ralph Lauren, blockbuster film producer George Lucas, and celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey - who is as adored in Africa as she is in the United States - also have amassed fortunes through their appeal to billions of fans worldwide.

But many of today's billionaires are far from household names and how they made their money and spend it is even less understood. Entrepreneurs who invented products with universal appeal and investors who plugged into major global trends dominate the list.

The largest concentration of wealth resides on Wall Street, where the sheer volume of trillions of dollars of global trading and capital flows each day has produced untold riches for money managers at top investments banks, hedge funds, venture capital and private equity firms.

Although the expanding global economy has created an increasing number of billionaires from Moscow to Sao Paolo, Brazil, the United States - which has led the way in cutting taxes and opening and deregulating markets - still racked up the most last year - 472 out of 1,125.

"There is a widespread perception - not inaccurate - that globalization has largely benefited the wealthy," said Jeffry Frieden, a Harvard University professor and author of "Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the 20th Century." The book documents how the concentration of wealth in the last era of globalization helped to plant the seeds of its destruction with the rise of communism after World War I.

Going global

Then as now, the rich got richer, but everyone else seemed to benefit as well from the global economy. Consumers and investors had access to products and assets from the whole world as trade and capital flows flourished. Immigration mushroomed as people in countries with few jobs or opportunities crossed into wealthier countries, where they could make a future for themselves.