I think I've figured part of it out.
It came to me watching another of Johnson's documentaries, The One Percent. In one segment, Johnson talks to the director of an exclusive wealth management conference. The conference director estimates the average wealth of attendees at around $400M, with some in the billions.
Watching this scene, the thought occurred to me: what if you were a 400-millionaire at one of these conferences, sitting next to a family worth $10 billion? If this family invested their fortune conservatively in a broad basket of stocks and bonds, and followed the 4% rule, their investments would earn your entire life savings each year.
Imagine: would you really feel wealthy sitting next to someone who passively rakes in the fruits of your lifetime of business achievement plus inherited wealth every year with no effort? Such a person would belong to a whole different class of wealth, if such things were discussed in the open.
Being a big fan of logarithms, this led me to a rather novel notion: to use decibels to measure wealth. On this scale, a difference of ten decibels represents a ten-fold increase in wealth. Twenty decibels would then represent two ten-fold increases in wealth, for a total 100-fold increase. (If you're familiar with decibels from engineering applications, you'll also recognize that this means three decibels represents a doubling of wealth.)
Of particular interest to us is what happens at the 14-decibel mark. This represents a 25-fold increase in wealth. If your wealth is 14 decibels larger than mine, you are in the lucky position that you could invest your wealth very conservatively and spin off my entire life savings each year using the 4% rule.
To set the zero-point of the decibel scale, I wanted someone at zero decibels to be "just barely wealthy" in some sense. I chose $500k for this. At this level, the 4% rule provides for $20k each year, which corresponds to Canada's "Low-Income Cut-Off" for one person living in an urban center. (Statscan goes to great lengths to point out that the LICO is not a poverty line, but I'm going to use it as such anyway. So sue me.) Below zero decibels, attempting to live on your wealth alone would mean living in poverty, and therefore you don't quality as wealthy (barring Early Retirement Extreme, of course). Above zero decibels, your wealth passively spins off enough income to keep you out of poverty.
Between the Forbes Billionaires list and the highly scientific and authoritative Celebrity Net Worth web site, I cobbled together a list of some notable people (mostly Canadian) and plotted their wealth in decibels:
The vertical lines every 14 decibels divide these people into orders of "wealth magnitude", so you can tell at a glance that, for example, Warren Buffet's wealth could passively earn the entire fortune of Jim Balsillie each year. I think Isadore Sharp is pretty rich, but his entire fortune could be earned passively by David Thomson each year. And imagine Jim Carrey sitting down to have a chat with Stephen Harper, knowing that he passively earns Harper's total personal fortune each year.
This, I think, may be one of the reasons that the rich don't discuss their wealth, and it's a problem that middle-class peer groups never experience, because if one person's fortune can passively earn another's fortune each year, then at least one of those people is not in the middle class.
P.S. One other remarkable thing to note is that, by my definition of "wealthy", simply selling the average Vancouver house makes you instantly (barely) wealthy. The passive income from the price of a Vancouver house would be enough to keep you out of poverty without ever working again. This is what you give up to own a house in Vancouver. Houses in other large Canadian cities are just a few decibels behind.
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