A new breed of rich

2008-05-04 13:08

San Francisco - They drive hybrid cars, if they drive at all, shop at local stores, if they shop at all and pay off their credit cards every month, if they use them at all.

They may have disposable income, but whatever they make, they live below their means, in a conscious effort to tread lightly on the earth.

They are a new breed of Gen Xers and Ys, Young and Wealthy but Normal, or Yawns.

The acronym comes from The Sunday Telegraph of London, which noted that an increasing number of rich young Britons are socially aware, concerned about the environment and given less to consuming than to giving money to charity.

Yawns sound dull, but they are the new movers and shakers, their dreams big and bold. They are men and women in their 20s, 30s and 40s who want nothing less than to change the world and save the planet.

Reduce poverty

Take Sean Blagsvedt, who moved from Seattle to India in 2004 to help build the local office of Microsoft Research. Moved by young children begging on the streets, Blagsvedt quit Microsoft and launched two networking sites, babajob.com and babalife.com, to link India's vast pool of potential workers with the people who need labour. The larger goal - to reduce poverty.

Far from the techie cafe life, Blagsvedt, 32, lives at babajob's headquarters in Bangalore, a 279-square-metre apartment where his mother and stepfather also live and 15 workers come and go every day.

"I'm a happy person," he said. "It's great to do something that you believe in doing."

The high-tech world has spawned some Yawns, but they can sprout anywhere. In fact, Yawns are a subset of a growing global movement of the eco-socially aware. The state of the economy and the state of the planet have inspired people to consider what they buy and how they spend in ways not seen since the "Small is Beautiful" and ecology movements of the 1970s.

The movement makes perfect sense, said David Grusky, a sociologist at Stanford University, since society tends to follow cycles - with anti-materialist periods like the hippie movement generating a pro-materialist reaction - the yuppie period, and so on. Not to mention, he adds, that the evidence of major climate change and a concern with terrorism gives rise to more interest in spiritual as opposed to material objectives.

Freecycling

The upshot, he said, is that "A cultural and demographic 'perfect storm' may well push us decisively toward an extreme form of postmaterialism in the upcoming period."

That helps explain why Earth Day has become so big again, why products are all going "green" and why freecycle.org, an internet community bulletin board where members offer items for free, has grown in five years from a dozen members in Tucson, Arizona, to a network of over 3 000 cities in 80 countries.

Deron Beal, the site's founder, counts four million members, and growing by 20 000 to 50 000 members each week.

"People have many reasons for freecycling," said Beal. "But the biggest reason is environmental - reusing and recycling instead of helping create more waste."

When Ray Sidney, a software engineer at Google, cashed in his stock options in 2003, they yielded him more money than he could ever burn through in his lifetime. (Billions? He won't say.) But instead of building himself a mansion, he retired to a four-bedroom house in Stateline, Nevada, and started giving money away.

He has given $400 000 to a local arts council to help build a new arts centre, $1m to a bus company to help launch a route so that casino workers wouldn't have to rely on private transportation to get to and from work, and $1.7m for a new football field and track at a local high school, for example.

Sidney also donates millions to charities that try to cure diseases or save the world.

His one rich-guy, carbon-hogging guilt trip: a single engine plane he flies about once a week to see his girlfriend in San Francisco.

But his pet project these days is pure Yawn. He is building what he calls "an environmentally friendly affordable housing development" on 100 acres (40 hectares) near his home in Stateline.

"This world and our society and the people in it are good and worthwhile," he said, by way of explanation, "and I think it's worth spending money to keep it around and try to improve it."

- AP