Billionaire Wilderness by Justin Farrell

Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West
by Justin Farrell
Princeton University Press, 2020

It's difficult to ignore a book titled Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West. The author, Justin Farrell, associate professor of sociology at Yale University, has managed to write a book interesting from acknowledgements to footnotes, but not without significant blemishes.

Returning home to Wyoming, Farrell heads to Teton County, which holds the disturbing position of being the county with the highest level of income inequality in the nation, as well as being the richest county in the nation. But, as you can imagine, a Yale sociologist requires more than income differentials and high levels of wealth to put his boots on the ground.

Specifically, the subset of people living in Teton County is perfect for answering the inquiry at the center of his book: “how the ultra-wealthy use nature to resolve key predicaments in their lives.” Economic predicaments about their wealth, from sharing it to growing it, and social predicaments, from feelings of guilt and inauthenticity to grappling with stigmas. This county, additionally, is suitable to a methodology that evaluates the “paired experiences of the rich and poor.” That is, a methodology that does not study the wealthy in isolation because “their way of life so heavily influences, and is influenced by [the poor].”

Unsurprisingly, Farrell carefully details his methodology, and the appendix on it is well worth reading. It is, however, on methodology we find our first proverbial speed bump. Farrell views Teton County as valuable for research because its inequality mirrors the nation’s: the “1 percent of the population owns the largest share of wealth (50 percent),” and the source of this concentration is largely from financial investments. So the county “exists outside the stereotypical halls of urban financial power (for example, Wall Street), yet it is intimately connected to this financial nerve center.”

It is true that the agreeable tax environment of Wyoming is appealing to any billionaire, and Farrell is careful about his sampling methods, but certainly there is some self-selection going on here. When you study an idiosyncratic group of people who have chosen to live in such a unique place, it is not surprising in the least that they also tend to be those experiencing some disquietude about their extreme wealth. Obviously, those who don't feel the need to assuage themselves through environmental immersion and philanthropy are comparatively less likely to make such a move. Those who move may be interesting on their own, but Farrell probably goes too far when he writes that they are "representative enough to allow me to generalize beyond the local specifics to learn broadly applicable lessons.”

One recurring frustration is that his otherwise commendable academic approach prevents him from making obvious moral assertions, but somehow doesn’t prevent him from walking the reader to the threshold of value judgements and allowing them to take the obvious next step. On the intention of his approach he writes:

Billionaire Wilderness is not a sloppy finger-pointing expose of greed and hypocrisy that some readers might assume exists (or hope to find). But nor is it an effort to defend or coddle my research subjects. Rather, my goal is to gather facts that allow us to better understand a rarely studied and little known but highly influential group.

To this end, he demonstrates the attachment many of the ultra-wealthy have to free markets and private property rights, and how they multiply their wealth through environmental conservation efforts which limit development. This is, in part, reflected by the fall in building permits for single family homes; such scarcity puts upward pressure on home values and drives out poor families who can no longer afford to live in these areas. Farrell does everything short of writing what the reader has already concluded: they’re brazen hypocrites. On Wall Street it’s Adam Smith’s invisible hand, in Teton County it’s rent seeking statism. Instead he only writes, “for many observers, these local commitments reek of hypocrisy.”

Another common, but admittedly less severe, problem is that because Farrell focuses on attitudes, he seems to forget they aren’t always unique to the ultra-wealthy. For example, when he declares that because the purchase of mountain homes and private fishing guides are done “with a practical aim to access the therapeutic benefits of nature, they are not as likely to be considered impractical opulence or crass materialism,” what is interesting here is the scale more than the reasoning. To put it another way, hipsters in Brooklyn jump through a similar loophole when they pour money into photography equipment because it doesn’t feel like consumerism. The phenomenon itself isn’t unique.

The incentives and inequality here can easily be explained within a public choice framework, and this would be a perfect case study for a book taking that line. Farrell’s, on the other hand, is centered around attitudes toward wealth, and he uses this to radical ends. You see, those who believe there should extortionate taxation are simply “calling into question the perceptions that many ultra-wealthy have of themselves.” There is a lot of really good research in this book, and the inequality in Teton county is grotesque, so it’s regrettable it will be used to the evil ends of those who believe “billionaires shouldn’t exist.”

Even with these problems, the subject matter here is inherently interesting, and Farrell is an effective writer (other than his obnoxious, pretentious over-use of italics and the word “veneer”) – that on its own is quite a lot. Much of the book, moreover, is obviously of value to social science. His mapping the system of philanthropy among the ultra-wealthy is effortlessly presented, is easily the most interesting chapter of the book, clearly has hours of hard work behind it, and must have many applications to other sociological problems.

Value-free social science probably isn’t possible. But in falling so short of it, in cheaply incorporating an anti-capitalist dimension based on the wealthy’s inauthenticity, all the while maintaining its pretense (we won’t say veneer), Billionaire Wilderness leaves behind a residue that could easily have been avoided.

—David Murphy holds a Masters of Finance from the University of Minnesota.