Evan Osnos' 'The Haves and Have-Yachts' is a book of essays about the new Gilded Age

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4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 19 June 2025

⏱️ 13 minutes

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Summary

Following Donald Trump's election in 2016, New Yorker reporter Evan Osnos wanted to understand what the president's wealth and status represented in the minds of his supporters – and in American culture at large. Osnos began reporting on the lives of the ultrawealthy, including the small but growing billionaire class. Now, Osnos has published a collection of essays The Haves and Have-Yachts, which explores the American relationship to immense wealth through anecdotes about superyachts, private concerts with pop stars, and doomsday preppers. In today's episode, Osnos speaks with NPR's Frank Langfitt about widening inequality, status anxieties among oligarchs, and what it feels like to live in a new Gilded Age.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. It's hard to really feel in concrete terms how rich the super rich are. Yeah, they might have nicer cars and eat at better restaurants, but a lot of people have nice cars and eat at expensive restaurants. What we're talking about when we talk about the super rich is the tippy top, the people at
0:23.1	the upper echelon of the 1%.
0:25.3	The writer Evan Osnos found the perfect vehicle by which to examine the super rich, and that is
0:31.0	the yacht.
0:32.0	And not just any yacht, but the super yacht.
0:35.1	His new book, The Haves and Have Yachts, is an exploration into excess.
0:40.2	And he spoke with the NPR's Frank Langfit for Book of the Day
0:42.6	about using his skills and experience as a foreign correspondent,
0:46.7	trying to understand this world as if it were some far away place.
0:50.7	Because for a lot of us, it is.
0:53.8	That's ahead. Evan Osnose, welcome to Book of the Day.
0:58.9	Thanks, Frank. It's great to be with you. What do you think this book shows people that they might
1:03.0	not fully grasp? Look, this book is actually about what it feels like to live in the new gilded
1:09.6	age. I think we have an abstract sense that we're living at a time when inequality has widened,
1:16.6	and there is a group of people who are living, frankly, very far ahead in wealth terms and the rest of the country.
1:23.2	But until you look at the numbers and you look at the actual details of that lifestyle, it can be hard to visualize.
1:32.2	And this is an attempt to make it as concrete as possible.
1:35.8	And I think it can be quite an astonishing thing when you really sit down and realize that, for instance, over the last eight years, billionaires in this country, their net worth has more than doubled.
1:51.4	And they are steadily pulling farther ahead than the rest of the country.
1:57.1	There are a ton of anecdotes in this book. Many of them really jump out.
2:01.8	But for you, when you were reporting, was there one or two particular things that just astonished you that you found?
2:08.6	I'll give you one that really stays with me.
	...

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