More on the Future

Life in the armored enclaves would be very different from the life of the rich now: no trips to Paris and fabulous vacation spots, no shopping on Fifth Avenue, no opening nights at the Metropolitan Opera or the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At best, you would the life of Prince Esterhazy, who built a palace -- a kind of minor Versailles -- in a swamp in Hungary and had his own orchestra, directed by Haydn. Very nice, but you can never get away to Vienna.

It would be like living in an upscale version of the movie Logan's Run.

I suspect the rich are like suburbanites. They live atop a hugely complex civilization and think they are independent of it. They can make it on their own. Well, you can certainly be a tenth century baron with little help from others. But it wasn't really such a great life.