<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right no-rightrail"><div><div class="image"></div><p></p></div></div>The world's ultra-rich are on the move.</p><p>In its <a href="http://www.knightfrank.com/wealthreport">2015 Wealth Report</a>, real estate consultancy Knight Frank took a look at the migration flows of the world's so-called high-net-worth-individuals (HNWIs) from 2003 to 2013.</p><p>As a destination, the UK far outpaced every other country, with more than 114,000 HNWIs migrating there during the 10-year period. (HNWIs are defined as <a href="http://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/ultra-high-net-worth-individuals-uhnwi.asp">having at least $30 million in assets.</a>)</p><p>The US came in third place with 42,000 ultra-rich immigrants.</p><p>Note, the total number of HNWIs in the US (4 million in 2013) is still higher than the total in the UK (815,000 in 2013).</p><p>So where did the majority of those people come from?</p><p>Asia, mostly. About 76,000 HNWIs left China throughout the decade, while more than 43,000 took left India. According to the report, Singapore has been a popular destination for many of those emigrants.</p><p>Check it out:</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table click-to-enlarge no-rightrail"><div><div class="image"><a title_source="Knight Frank 2015 Wealth Report" title_caption="" class="zoomin" href="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/54f8e6c16bb3f7665887b367-960/screen shot 2015-03-05 at 6.27.14 pm.png"><span class="sprites click-to-enlarge-icon" title="Click to enlarge"></span></a><p class="source"><span>Knight Frank 2015 Wealth Report</span></p></div><p></p></div></div></p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/maps-countries-territory-2014-4">9 Animated Maps That Will Change The Way You See The World</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="xnMTYzbTrjVXj7b6Ir8JPwdraRakXLY4" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

Here's where the world's ultra-rich are moving - and where they are coming from

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container float_right"><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></p>
<p>Andrew Carnegie emigrated as a child from Scotland to the United States in 1848 with practically nothing. Fifty-three years later, he was the wealthiest man in the world.</p>
<p>In 1908, a young journalist named Napoleon Hill met the steel magnate when he was at the height of his power. Carnegie admired Hill's drive and talent and decided that Hill would be the vehicle for his many ideas on how to achieve success.</p>
<p>Their conversations would become the basis for all of Hill's writings from that point forward, including 1937's "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Classic-Napoleon-Masterpiece-Illustrated-Annotated-ebook/dp/B007RHO316/ref=pd_sim_kstore_1">Think and Grow Rich</a>," which is one of the top-selling books of all time.</p>
<p>Hill collected and edited the notes from the initial conversations with Carnegie and published them in 1948 as "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Think-Wealth-Tarcher-Success-Classics-ebook/dp/B005ERIKPQ/ref=sr_1_1">Think Your Way to Wealth</a>."</p>
<p>At one point in their discussion as recounted in the book, Hill asks Carnegie how he defines success. Carnegie responds by saying success is: "<strong>The power with which to acquire whatever one demands of life without violating the rights of others.</strong>"</p>
<p>Hill then says that luck must often play a role in getting a big break, but Carnegie refutes the idea. "A man may, and sometimes men do, fall into opportunities through mere chance, or luck; but they have a queer way of falling out of these opportunities the first time opposition overtakes them," Carnegie says.</p>
<p>Essentially, he says, luck can bring successful people opportunities to demonstrate their abilities but an untalented or uncouth person can only ride a wave of luck for so long.</p>
<p>Carnegie then explains that the "power" he refers to in his definition of success has 10 elements:</p>
<ul>
<li>The habit of definiteness of purpose</li>
<li>Promptness of decision</li>
<li>Soundness of character (intentional honesty)</li>
<li>Strict discipline over one's emotions</li>
<li>Obsessional desire to render useful service</li>
<li>Thorough knowledge of one's occupation</li>
<li>Tolerance on all subjects</li>
<li>Loyalty to one's personal associates and faith in a Supreme Being</li>
<li>Enduring thirst for knowledge</li>
<li>Alertness of imagination</li>
</ul>
<p>The mandatory religious element of Carnegie's belief system comes across as dated, but it taps into his belief in "applied faith," which even a fully secular person can abide by. Whatever drives you, it is necessary from Carnegie's perspective to have such a strong belief in yourself and your purpose that you act with total confidence.</p>
<p>And finally, according to Carnegie, the truly successful do not profit from taking advantage of others. In "Think and Grow Rich," Hill says that it's not a coincidence that history is filled with instances of tyrants and dictators being overthrown. <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/the-magic-ladder-to-success-2014-8">The most successful people know how to work in harmony with others</a>, not dominion over them.</p>

Here's How Legendary Industrialist Andrew Carnegie Defined Success

<p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>In the aftermath of the <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/the-fbi-has-identified-the-21-year-old-suspected-of-shooting-9-people-in-south-carolina-2015-6">slaying of nine African-Americans</a> at a historically black church, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-removes-confederate-flags-from-website-2015-6">retailers</a> and <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/mississippi-confederate-flag-debate-2015-6">states</a> are rejecting a symbol of America's racist history - the Confederate flag.&#xa0;<p>But even if America is successful in obliterating the Confederate flag, it will not disappear off the face of the Earth. That's because the American-born flag has found a home in several other places around the world - some of which are well aware of the negative connotation the flag holds.</p><p>Here are some of those places:</p><h3>Italy</h3><div><div></div></div><p class="embed-spacer">Italians in the south of Italy and Americans in the American South view the Confederate flag in a very similar way, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/06/22/why-do-italian-soccer-fans-and-other-foreigners-fly-the-confederate-flag/?wpisrc=nl_most&amp;wpmm=1" target="_blank">according to the Washington Post</a>.&#xa0;Southern Italians, inspired by the Civil War, adopted the Confederate flag as a sign of rebellion around the time they were absorbed into the Kingdom of Italy in 1861.</p><p class="embed-spacer"><span>"We too are a defeated people," an unnamed professor in Naples said, according to the Post. "Once we were a rich and independent country, and then they came from the North and conquered us and took our wealth and power away to Rome."</span></p><h3 class="embed-spacer"><span>Brazil</span></h3><p><span><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In post-Civil War America, thousands of Southerners fled the country and headed to Brazil, enticed by the Brazilian government's offer of land grants.&#xa0;</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Slavery was also still legal in Brazil at the time. </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Roughly 150 years later, that mass emigration is evident in an annual Dixie-themed festival in Brazil's southeastern Sao Paulo state. The festival draws thousands of Brazilians who trace their ancestry back to the American South, </span><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/27/brazilians-celebrate-confederate-ancestry-deep-south" target="_blank">according to the Guardian</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">.</span></p><p>The Guardian said that the Brazilians, many of whom are of mixed race, do not view the Confederate flag in a negative way.&#xa0;</p><p>"To me it's a positive symbol of my heritage," Keila Padovese Armelin, a festival attendee, told the Guardian.&#xa0;<span style="line-height: 1.5em;">"For us, it doesn't have a negative connotation at all."</span></p><h3><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sweden</span></h3><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In a central part of Sweden called Dalarna, people love American kitsch.&#xa0;</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This Swedish sub-culture called "raggare" has a fascination with 1950s American pop-culture.</span></span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/in-dalarna-a-bit-of-america-in-sweden/2013/08/29/1571f10a-0a7f-11e3-8974-f97ab3b3c677_story.html" target="_blank">Washington Post reported</a> in 2013, in Dalarna "<span>men strut around in cowboy hats and leather boots. American flags flutter outside family homes, and posters advertise hamburger bars and 1950s nostalgia markets."&#xa0;</span></span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span>The Post says in Sweden - void of any political context - the Confederate flag represents another piece of Americana.</span></span></p><h3><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span>Germany</span></span></h3><div><div></div></div><p class="embed-spacer"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In Germany, the Confederate flag is not void of political context. European skinheads and neo-Nazi groups have adopted the Confederate flag and variations of it because of its historical context as a symbol of racism and white supremacy.</span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In addition, <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/06/confederates-on-the-rhine/239724/" target="_blank">the Atlantic reports</a> that American Civil War reenactments have become popular in Germany, with many Germans choosing to side with the Confederacy.</span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Wolfgang Hochbruck,&#xa0;<span>a professor of American Studies at the University of Freiburg, told the Atlantic this is because&#xa0;<span>"some of the Confederate reenactors in Germany are acting out Nazi fantasies of racial superiority."<span><br /></span></span></span></span></p><h3><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span><span>Northern Ireland</span></span></span></h3><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span><span><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div></span></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In Northern Ireland, the Red Hand Defenders, an extremist protestant paramilitary group, march with the Confederate flag. According to the </span><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/06/22/why-do-italian-soccer-fans-and-other-foreigners-fly-the-confederate-flag/?wpisrc=nl_most&amp;wpmm=1" target="_blank">Washington Post,</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> they do this because many Confederate soldiers were from Ulster - a part of Northern Ireland. One such famous example is the&#xa0;</span><a href="http://www.ulstervirginia.com/stonewalljackson.asp" target="_blank">Confederate General Stonewall Jackson</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">.&#xa0;</span></span></p><h3><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span><span>Ukraine</span></span></span></h3><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span><span><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div></span></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">During the ongoing conflict in Ukraine,&#xa0;</span><a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/09/04/new_russia_flag_confederate_undertones.html" target="_blank">pro-Russian separatists</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> have taken up a variation of the Confederate flag as a symbol of their own movement. It is called the flag of Novorossiya or "New Russia" and it bears a striking resemblance to the flag of the American south.</span></span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">However, the founder of the flag asserts this similarity is purely coincidental. He told Slate he found the design for the flag "online somewhere".</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#xa0;</span></p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/how-athletes-get-into-harvard-happy-bottom-quarter-malcolm-gladwell-2015-6">Malcolm Gladwell: Here's why Harvard needs 'dumb' kids too</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="R1YThydToTggpxC9W47qA8blO2EYYahs" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

Here's why the Confederate flag is flown outside the US

<p><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;"><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image"><p class="source"><span>REUTERS/ Carlos Barria</span></p><p class="caption">A woman shops in a Louis Vuitton store during Vogue's 4th Fashion's Night Out: Shopping Night with Celebrities in downtown Shanghai, September 7, 2012.</p></div><p></p></div></div></span>HONG KONG (Reuters) - Wealthy Chinese are likely to buy fewer luxury goods again this year after the steepest cut-back on spending in at least five years, changing the game for high-end retailers like Louis Vuitton which have staked their growth on China.</p>
<p>Overall spending by wealthy Chinese fell by 15 percent in 2013, the third consecutive year of decline, according to a survey by the Hurun Report. Spending on gifts in particular also declined by a quarter.</p>
<p>The drop coincides with a government crackdown on corruption and gifting, as well as an a growing penchant for travelling and shopping overseas to circumvent Chinese consumption taxes on luxury goods as high as 40 percent.</p>
<p>The shrinking ranks of wealthy residents in China has also reduced luxury spending. One in three so-called high net worth individuals have already left, or are planning to leave, the country, the report showed, mostly to seek better opportunities for their children's education.</p>
<p>Chinese are the top consumers of luxury goods globally. A slowdown in their spending, or a change in shopping habits, would hurt high-end retailers already struggling with a weaker Chinese economy and a more sophisticated clientele that has moved away from logo-branded goods.</p>
<p>Luxury group Richemont, the maker of high-end IWC watches and Cartier jewellery, reported this week slower-than-expected sales growth in the third quarter, largely due to weaker Asian demand.</p>
<p>LVMH, the world's biggest luxury goods group, has also seen sales growth slow last year as Chinese demand cooled, prompting the company, and brands from rival Kering SA to offer goods with more discreet logos and in expensive materials.</p>
<p>"In terms of traditional luxury - leathers, accessories, watches - this year is going to be flat if not a little bit down,"Hurun Report founder and chief researcher Rupert Hoogewerf told Reuters.</p>
<p>"For luxuries like tea, healthcare, even education, we are still looking at a booming market."</p>
<p>The crackdown on conspicuous spending, which began in 2012, is part of a vow made by Chinese President Xi Jinping to be tougher on graft. He has focused in particular on gifts made to government officials often in exchange for preferential treatment or contracts.</p>
<p>As a result, many wealthy Chinese now buy luxury goods for themselves, rather than as gifts, Hoogewerf said.</p>
<p>Products by Hermes, Chanel, LVMH's Louis Vuitton brand, Apple Inc and Gucci remained among the most sought-after brands for gifting, the survey showed.</p>
<p>Less popular were Bulgari - another LVMH brand - Salvatore Ferragamo, Tiffany and Co and the fiery baijiu liquor made by Chinese firm Kweichow Moutai Co Ltd, once the top tipple of Communist Party officials.</p>
<h3>SAVVIER CONSUMERS</h3>
<p>Affluent Chinese often shop online for the best price globally. They have also become more confident about their fashion choices, mixing high-street clothing and accessories with branded goods.</p>
<p>"There is a much savvier consumer out there," Hoogewerf said. "There will be more purchasing done overseas than in China. For a brand that's global it's fine."</p>
<p>Over two-thirds of luxury spending by mainland Chinese was overseas in 2013, a factor that contributed to theUnited States overtaking China as the world's fastest growing luxury market, according to a study by consultancy firm Bain &amp; Company released in December.</p>
<p>China's super-rich are also avid collectors - 70 percent of wealthy Chinese rank collecting as a hobby - but what they are coveting is changing.</p>
<p>Ancient calligraphy last year surpassed luxury watches as the most-collected, knocking watches out of the No. 1 spot for the first time in five years, the Hurun report showed, which could mean revenue losses for top watch makers but a boon for auctioneers.</p>
<p>Patek Philippe remained the most popular watch brand for collectors for the seventh year running while Christie's was the top ranked foreign auction house, the report showed.</p>
<p>Besides spending less at home, more rich Chinese are leaving the country. The number of wealthy Chinese who have emigrated or are planning to do so rose to 64 percent from 60 percent in the previous year, the survey said.</p>
<p>Most of those leaving, or planning to, are looking for permanent residency overseas - the United States, Europeand Canada are top picks. Very few want to give up their nationality, perhaps because their outlook for China is improving.</p>
<p>The report showed millionaires' confidence in China's economy rose for the first time in five years but those who felt "extremely confident" still accounted for only 31 percent of those surveyed.</p>
<p>The survey's results are based on responses from 393 Chinese millionaires, or those with personal wealth of at least 10 million yuan ($1.65 million). The Hurun Research Institute has conducted the survey for the past 10 years. ($1 = 6.0460 Chinese yuan)</p>
<p>(Editing by Miral Fahmy)</p>

Luxury Goods In China Have Lost Their Luster

<p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>In November 2011, billionaire hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman, the founder/CEO of Omega Advisors, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/leon-cooperman-letter-to-obama-2011-11">sent an open letter to President Barack Obama</a> detailing the issues he has with how the president has treated the nation's wealthiest.<p><a href="http://wallstreetweek.com/">Cooperman told "Wall Street Week" cohost Gary Kaminsky</a> that after he sent that letter he was audited by the Internal Revenue Service.</p><p>"You know, I got audited by the IRS, but I don't know if there's any cause and effect," he said.</p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">"I was just upset," Cooperman said, explaining why he wrote the letter. "I felt the dialogue was unnecessarily destructive...Again, I'm not running for president. I don't want to be president. I respect the president. He's got a very difficult job. But I think that we should not pit the 99 percent against the 1 percent."&#xa0;</span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Cooperman explained that his life should be used as an example for the younger generations.&#xa0;</span></p><p>He said that he has lived the "American Dream."</p><p>He<span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#xa0;grew up poor in the South Bronx.&#xa0;</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">His parents were immigrants. He was educated in the public school system. He was also the first generation in his family to graduate from college. He attended Hunter College in Manhattan and later graduated with his MBA from Columbia.&#xa0;</span></p><p>When he finished his education, he had no money, student loan debt, a wife and a six-month old child to take care of.&#xa0;</p><p>He ended up going to work for Goldman Sachs. During his 25 tenure at the bank, he became a partner and later CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management.&#xa0;<span style="line-height: 1.5em;">After Goldman, he founded hedge fund Omega Advisors, which now manages about $9.5 billion in assets, including $2.5 billion of his and Omega employees' capital.&#xa0;</span></p><p>Today, Cooperman has&#xa0;<a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/leon-g-cooperman/">estimated networth of $3.7 billion</a>. He has also donated millions to charity and to his alma maters. Cooperman and his wife Toby, a<a href="http://www.eclcofnj.org/news.html">&#xa0;recently-retired teacher who taught special needs children in New Jersey for 25 years</a>, have also signed Warren Buffett and Bill Gates' "<a href="http://givingpledge.org/">Giving Pledge</a>." He said that all of his wealth will go to charity.&#xa0;</p><p>"I think that's something to emulate. These youngsters can see what can be accomplished with some hard work and luck," Cooperman said on the show's web extra series.&#xa0;</p><p>Here's the interview clip:&#xa0;</p><div><div></div></div><p class="embed-spacer"></p><p>Here's a copy of the letter he sent Obama: &#xa0;</p><p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span>OPEN LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA from&#xa0;</span><span>Leon Cooperman</span><span>.</span><br><br><span>November 28, 2011</span><br><br><span>President Barack Obama</span><br><span>The White House</span><br><span>1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW</span><br><span>Washington, D.C. 20500</span><br><br><span>Dear Mr. President,</span><br><br><span>It is with a great sense of disappointment that I write this. Like many others, I hoped that your election would bring a salutary change of direction to the country, despite what more than a few feared was an overly aggressive social agenda. And I cannot credibly blame you for the economic mess that you inherited, even if the policy response on your watch has been profligate and largely ineffectual. (You did not, after all, invent TARP.) I understand that when surrounded by cries of "the end of the world as we know it is nigh", even the strongest of minds may have a tendency to shoot first and aim later in a well-intended effort to stave off the predicted apocalypse.</span><br><br><span>But what I can justifiably hold you accountable for is your and your minions' role in setting the tenor of the rancorous debate now roiling us that smacks of what so many have characterized as "class warfare". Whether this reflects your principled belief that the eternal divide between the haves and have-nots is at the root of all the evils that afflict our society or just a cynical, populist appeal to his base by a president struggling in the polls is of little importance. What does matter is that the divisive, polarizing tone of your rhetoric is cleaving a widening gulf, at this point as much visceral as philosophical, between the downtrodden and those best positioned to help them. It is a gulf that is at once counterproductive and freighted with dangerous historical precedents. And it is an approach to governing that owes more to desperate demagoguery than your Administration should feel comfortable with.</span><br><br><span>Just to be clear, while I have been richly rewarded by a life of hard work (and a great deal of luck), I was not to-the-manor-born. My father was a plumber who practiced his trade in the South Bronx after he and my mother emigrated from Poland. I was the first member of my family to earn a college degree. I benefited from both a good public education system (P.S. 75, Morris High School and Hunter College, all in the Bronx) and my parents' constant prodding. When I joined&#xa0;Goldman Sachs&#xa0;following graduation from Columbia University's business school, I had no money in the bank, a negative net worth, a National Defense Education Act student loan to repay, and a six-month-old child (not to mention his mother, my wife of now 47 years) to support. I had a successful, near-25-year run at Goldman, which I left 20 years ago to start a private investment firm. As a result of my good fortune, I have been able to give away to those less blessed far more than I have spent on myself and my family over a lifetime, and last year I subscribed to Warren Buffett's Giving Pledge to ensure that my money, properly stewarded, continues to do some good after I'm gone.</span><br><br><span>My story is anything but unique. I know many people who are similarly situated, by both humble family history and hard-won accomplishment, whose greatest joy in life is to use their resources to sustain their communities. Some have achieved a level of wealth where philanthropy is no longer a by-product of their work but its primary impetus. This is as it should be. We feel privileged to be in a position to give back, and we do. My parents would have expected nothing less of me.</span><br><br><span>I am not, by training or disposition, a policy wonk, polemicist or pamphleteer. I confess admiration for those who, with greater clarity of expression and command of the relevant statistical details, make these same points with more eloquence and authoritativeness than I can hope to muster. For recent examples, I would point you to "Hunting the Rich" (Leaders, The Economist, September 24, 2011), "The Divider vs. the Thinker" (Peggy Noonan, The&#xa0;Wall Street Journal, October 29, 2011), "Wall Street Occupiers Misdirect Anger" (Christine Todd Whitman,&#xa0;Bloomberg, October 31, 2011), and "Beyond Occupy" (Bill Keller,&#xa0;The New York Times, October 31, 2011) - all, if you haven't read them, making estimable work of the subject.</span><br><br><span>But as a taxpaying businessman with a weekly payroll to meet and more than a passing familiarity with the ways of both Wall Street and Washington, I do feel justified in asking you: is the tone of the current debate really constructive?</span><br><br><span>People of differing political persuasions can (and do) reasonably argue about whether, and how high, tax rates should be hiked for upper-income earners; whether the Bush-era tax cuts should be extended or permitted to expire, and for whom; whether various deductions and exclusions under the federal tax code that benefit principally the wealthy and multinational corporations should be curtailed or eliminated; whether unemployment benefits and the payroll tax cut should be extended; whether the burdens of paying for the nation's bloated entitlement programs are being fairly spread around, and whether those programs themselves should be reconfigured in light of current and projected budgetary constraints; whether financial institutions deemed "too big to fail" should be serially bailed out or broken up first, like an earlier era's trusts, because they pose a systemic risk and their size benefits no one but their owners; whether the solution to what ails us as a nation is an amalgam of more regulation, wealth redistribution, and a greater concentration of power in a central government that has proven no more (I'm being charitable here) adept than the private sector in reining in the excesses that brought us to this pass - the list goes on and on, and the dialectic is admirably American. Even though, as a high-income taxpayer, I might be considered one of its targets, I find this reassessment of so many entrenched economic premises healthy and long overdue. Anyone who could survey today's challenging fiscal landscape, with an un- and underemployment rate of nearly 20 percent and roughly 40 percent of the country on public assistance, and not acknowledge an imperative for change is either heartless, brainless, or running for office on a very parochial agenda. And if I end up paying more taxes as a result, so be it. The alternatives are all worse.</span><br><br><span>But what I do find objectionable is the highly politicized idiom in which this debate is being conducted. Now, I am not naive. I understand that in today's America, this is how the business of governing typically gets done - a situation that, given the gravity of our problems, is as deplorable as it is seemingly ineluctable. But as President first and foremost and leader of your party second, you should endeavor to rise above the partisan fray and raise the level of discourse to one that is both more civil and more conciliatory, that seeks collaboration over confrontation. That is what "leading by example" means to most people.</span><br><br><span>Capitalism is not the source of our problems, as an economy or as a society, and capitalists are not the scourge that they are too often made out to be. As a group, we employ many millions of taxpaying people, pay their salaries, provide them with healthcare coverage, start new companies, found new industries, create new products, fill store shelves at Christmas, and keep the wheels of commerce and progress (and indeed of government, by generating the income whose taxation funds it) moving. To frame the debate as one of rich-and-entitled versus poor-and-dispossessed is to both miss the point and further inflame an already incendiary environment. It is also a naked, political pander to some of the basest human emotions - a strategy, as history teaches, that never ends well for anyone but totalitarians and anarchists.</span><br><br><span>With due respect, Mr. President, it's time for you to throttle-down the partisan rhetoric and appeal to people's better instincts, not their worst. Rather than assume that the wealthy are a monolithic, selfish and unfeeling lot who must be subjugated by the force of the state, set a tone that encourages people of good will to meet in the middle. When you were a community organizer in Chicago, you learned the art of waging a guerrilla campaign against a far superior force. But you've graduated from that milieu and now help to set the agenda for that superior force. You might do well at this point to eschew the polarizing vernacular of political militancy and become the transcendent leader you were elected to be. You are likely to be far more effective, and history is likely to treat you far more kindly for it.</span><br><br><span>Sincerely,</span><br><br><span>Leon G. Cooperman</span><br><span>Chairman and Chief Executive Officer</span><span><br><br /></br></span></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></br></p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/excel-what-if-analysis-data-tables-2015-4">This is the Excel trick that will change everything about how you work with data</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="h2bzJudDphyVLhOx4BBk5EthBy0FqKaI" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

LEON COOPERMAN: I sent Obama an angry letter and then I got audited by the IRS

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<p>ONE of the most perplexing questions of the early 21st century is this: how can the French, who invented joie de vivre, the three-tier cheese trolley and Dior's jaunty New Look, be so resolutely miserable? To outsiders, the world's favourite tourist destination embodies the triumph of pleasure over desk-slavery, slow food over fast, the life of the flâneur over that of the frenetic. Yet polls suggest that the French are more depressed than Ugandans or Uzbekistanis, and more pessimistic about their country's future than Albanians or Iraqis. A global barometer of hope and <keyword id="6358439" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="happiness">happiness</keyword> puts the French second to bottom of a 54-country world ranking, behind austerity-battered Italians, Greeks and Spaniards, and ahead only of Portugal.</p>
<p>Happiness is of course a slippery concept. Asked if they are happy, people everywhere are more than likely to say yes; far fewer say that they laugh much. Gallup, a pollster, has devised a global "positive experience index", based on whether respondents report that they laughed and smiled a lot or did something enjoyable the previous day. By such measures, <keyword id="6354785" type="COUNTRY" weightage="60" keywordseo="France">France</keyword> does better than the world average. But take out war-torn or poor countries, and measure the French against fellow rich nations, and they still turn out to be unhappier than their peers. The French report fewer "happy experiences" than those in America, Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Canada, Norway, the Netherlands, Austria and Belgium. The land of the bon vivant is an unhappy outlier.</p>
<p>Claudia Senik, a French economist at the Paris School of Economics, calls this the "French unhappiness puzzle". In a 2013 study, she found that the French were not only unhappier than their level of wealth and unemployment would suggest, but also more discontented than French-speaking people in Belgium and Canada (so language is not the reason), and more miserable when they emigrated compared with non-French expatriates in the same place (so they take their gloom with them). "Unhappiness seems to be more than about life in France," Ms Senik concluded. "It is something about being French."</p>
<p>Naturally, Ms Senik's findings caused a stir in France, prompting Maureen Dowd, a New York Times writer who was visiting Paris at the time, to report that "joie de vivre has given way to gaze de navel". Le Monde ran three pages under the title "Liberté, Égalité, Morosité", in a bid to decode its fellow countrymen's "persistent melancholy". France, it turns out, has the highest suicide rate in western Europe after Belgium and Switzerland. An American psychiatric study showed that, among ten rich countries, the French were the most likely to have a "major depressive episode" at some point in their life. Even the French language seems to be particularly well stocked--morosité, tristesse, malheur, chagrin, malaise, ennui, mélancolie, anomie, désespoir--with negativity. Can there really be something about being French that makes for so much gloom?</p>
<h3>Fifty shades of noir</h3>
<p>Two periods in France's recent history have contributed most to the rich seam of misery in its culture--one after the revolution, the other after the second world war. In the quarter-century from the fall of the ancien régime in 1789 to 1814, France overthrew a monarchy, endured the Terror, and lost an empire. After this period the Romantic movement, from Baudelaire to Chopin, expressed a melancholy infused with nostalgia and ambivalence towards a society dominated by rationalist thought and bourgeois values.</p>
<p>In "René", a novel published in 1802, Chateaubriand introduced to the world the tortured French youth, whose "wretched, barren, and disenchanted" existence embodied what the writer called the mal du siècle. In his memoirs, Chateaubriand recognised that he had set more of a trend than he had bargained for:</p>
<h3>If René did not exist, I would not write it again...all we hear nowadays are pitiful and disjointed phrases; the only subject is gales and storms, and unknown ills moaned out to the clouds and to the night. There's not a fop who has just left college who hasn't dreamt he was the most unfortunate of men; there's not a milksop who hasn't exhausted all life has to offer by the age of sixteen; who hasn't believed himself tormented by his own genius; who, in the abyss of his thoughts, hasn't given himself over to the "wave of passions"; who hasn't struck his pale and dishevelled brow and astonished mankind with a sorrow whose name neither he, nor it, knows.</h3>
<p>Romantic miserabilism was experienced as a form of pleasure. "Melancholy", wrote Victor Hugo, "is the happiness of being sad." It was treated as a noble state, a higher aesthetic condition. "I do not pretend that joy cannot be allied with beauty," wrote Baudelaire in his diary. "But I do say that joy is one of its most vulgar ornaments; whereas melancholy is, as it were, its illustrious companion." Much of this tradition is firmly fixed in today's French mind. Hugo's poem "Melancholia" is required reading for French lycée students, as is Alfred de Musset's "La Nuit de Mai", whose narrator laments that "Nothing makes us so great as great sorrow."</p>
<p>The strange beauty of melancholy finds some echo in mid-20th-century France, which produced a second wave of miserabilism. Françoise Sagan's "Bonjour Tristesse", published in 1954, for instance, opens with the 17-year-old Cécile's lament:</p>
<h3>A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me, but now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else.</h3>
<p>Yet the ennui that marked this second period had less to do with nostalgia than nausea. In "L'Etranger", Albert Camus's protagonist, Mersault, is perhaps the world's best-known embodiment of anguish in the face of the unknowable meaning of existence, or the absurd. Post-war French theatre developed the absurd, through the plays of Camus, Jean Anouilh and the Franco-Romanian Eugène Ionescu. Samuel Beckett, an Irishman, wrote "Waiting for Godot" in French. On a chilly winter's evening in 1953 on Paris's left bank, two years before the play went on to unsettle English-speaking audiences, it was first staged at the 75-seat Théâtre de Babylone, and struck a chord with post-war Paris.</p>
<p>Neither Camus nor his contemporary, Jean-Paul Sartre, was ultimately a pessimist. But it is the torment of existentialism, rather than its conclusions, that captured the imagination. Indeed, the left-bank literary clique led by Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, which gravitated to the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Près, adopted ennui as a way of life as well as a philosophy. When Sartre handed the original manuscript of "Nausea" to Gallimard, his publisher, he entitled his novel "Melancholia".</p>
<p>Perhaps the best exemplar of miserabilism among contemporary French fiction writers is Michel Houellebecq, the controversial Goncourt-prize-winning novelist, in such nihilist works as "Whatever" or "Atomised". His characters invariably lead empty, often sordid, always disillusioned lives. "In the end," writes Mr Houellebecq in "The Elementary Particles", "there's just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. In the end, there's only death."</p>
<p>There have, of course, been periods during which the gloom lifted. It was after the double shock of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 and the bloody Paris Commune, after all, that the Impressionists took their tubes of paint and brushes outdoors, delighting in light and colour. Despite a measure of fin-de-siècle anxiety, the belle époque was a moment of breezy certainty. Gustave Eiffel unveiled his wrought-iron tower in 1889. By 1900 the City of Lights drew 51m visitors to its universal exhibition, under the theme of "Paris, capital of the civilised world", and Matisse, Derain and other fauves had started to capture exuberant colour and warmth on canvas. Yet miserabilism seems to have a greater hold on the French mind today.</p>
<h3>I doubt, therefore I am</h3>
<p>One reason could be the French appetite for brutal self-criticism. From Descartes onwards, doubt is the first philosophical reflex. "The rationalist tradition makes us sceptical; we exist through criticism," argues Monique Canto-Sperber, a philosopher and director of Paris Sciences et Lettres, an elite university. "We treat those too full of hope as naive." In "Candide, or The Optimist", published in 1759, Voltaire mocks the folly of looking on the bright side in the face of unimaginable horrors. "Optimism", says a disabused Candide in the novel, "is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable." When a French magazine recently tried to decode today's national pessimism, it concluded: "It's Voltaire's fault". "We find it more chic and more spiritual to doubt everything."</p>
<p>Up to a point, this is an affectation of the elite. "It is in a certain Parisian milieu that there are intellectuals who are grumpy by trade," argues Jack Lang, the Socialist former culture minister: "There is a gap with the rest of French society." Yet France cherishes public intellectuals, so their influence spreads wide. It is a talking, thinking culture. Its films value dialogue over plot; its talk-shows are interminable. The French, wrote a helpful official guide for British servicemen heading to France for the 1944 liberation offensive, "enjoy an intellectual argument more than we do. You will often think that two Frenchmen are having a violent quarrel when they are simply arguing some abstract point."</p>
<p>The country treats its philosophers like national treasures, even celebrities, splashing photographs of them across the pages of glossy magazines. And it ensures that the canon of French thought is fed to the whole country. All pupils taking the school-leaving baccalauréat exam must study philosophy, and teenagers are examined on such cheery essay questions as "Is man condemned to self-delusion?" or "Do we have an obligation to seek truth?". So if French intellectuals are predominantly critical pessimists, miserabilism may in part be the consequence of holding them in such esteem. Were Americans to pay more attention to the writings of Noam Chomsky and Jared Diamond, perhaps they would be gloomy too.</p>
<p>This critical reflex reaches right into the classroom, generating a further source of negativity. In French schools, for example, the tradition is for teachers to grade harshly, and praise with excessive moderation. Under a nationwide system that awards marks out of 20, a pupil doing a dictée has points (or even half-points) deducted for every error; so a child swiftly ends up with zero. The idea is that all children can always do better. The result is a lack of what the French, borrowing English syntax, call "la positive attitude".</p>
<p>Fully 75% of French pupils worry that they will get bad grades in maths tests, according to an OECD study, nudging stressed-out South Korean levels (78%). A recent government-commissioned report on a small pilot experiment in some French secondary schools, where Cartesian grading had been shelved in favour of a more encouraging system, noted with some surprise that weaker pupils were absent from school less often, more confident in the classroom, and "less stressed when faced with failure".</p>
<p>If the French are life's critics, they are at the same time idealists, and these two make unhappy bedfellows. Thanks to the philosophers of the Enlightenment and the 1789 revolution, the concept of progress towards an ideal society has, despite periodic turmoil and bloodshed, been a powerful narrative in the French mind. The best embodiment of this is the French declaration of human rights. Unlike the American declaration of independence in 1776, which guaranteed the rights of all Americans, the French version 13 years later guaranteed the rights of all mankind.</p>
<p>To this day, the ambition to inspire the world with a secular republican ideal, backed by the spread of French culture and language, stirs political leaders. "France is only itself when in pursuit of an ideal," wrote Dominique de Villepin, a former prime minister, in a deliberate echo of Charles de Gaulle's reference to the country's "exceptional destiny". It is great stuff for myth-making, as De Gaulle demonstrated so masterfully after liberation from Nazi occupation. But when reality does not quite match up to ideals, self-criticism kicks in and misery results.</p>
<p>Left-wing French intellectuals never quite got over the failed revolutionary promise of the May '68 student uprising, nor their disillusion at the declining influence of French thought from the 1980s onwards. Others struggled to reconcile French values with the country's darker moments, notably under occupation. Today, "belief in a better tomorrow has come to an end," says Christophe Prochasson, a French historian. "There is a crisis of progress."</p>
<p>Put simply, the French know that they have enjoyed a fabulous way of life, and are depressed by the thought that neither the French model, nor Europe, seems able to provide the prosperity or the national grandeur it once did. The upshot is that "we are collectively animated by a sense of doom and decline," says Dominique Moïsi, of the French Institute of International Relations. "We have in mind this great nation of ours: the major power in Europe under Louis XIV and Napoleon I, the biggest allied standing army in the first world war. Now there's a sense of 'What happened to us?'."</p>
<h3>The pleasure of pouting</h3>
<p>France is not alone in contemplating its diminished status. Britain had a grand past too. But the post-colonial, post-industrial British do not share the French sense of national depression, partly because they never considered their empire to be part of an effort to export a culture or a model society. And, having accidentally given the world the English language, Britain feels relaxed about its global cultural influence. The contrasting decline of French, once the language of European diplomacy, high culture and polite conversation, is felt as a national wound.</p>
<p>Idealistic France's painful reckoning with decline is therefore quite different to the British approach of resigned muddling-through, argues Jean-Philippe Mathy, of the University of Illinois, in "Melancholy Politics". It is almost, says Mr Prochasson, the historian, a form of bereavement. "There is a very profound pessimism today due to the realisation that France is becoming a country like any other, and this is difficult."</p>
<p>Does it matter? Certainly, France's high suicide rate is a serious cause for concern. Dissatisfaction also makes the French a particularly fractious people to govern, ready as they are to contest, and protest, at the slightest excuse. Confidence too is elusive in a country given to pessimism, making it harder still for politicians to persuade the French to try new ways of doing things.</p>
<p>Yet pessimism has not stopped France from enjoying itself. French hedonism has survived miserabilism--or perhaps provided a refuge from it. Even in the immediate aftermath of the 1789 revolution, the country exhibited a "thirst for pleasure", as one contemporary newspaper report put it: "The stream of fashion, a succession of dinners, the luxury of their splendid furniture and their mistresses, are the objects that chiefly employ the thoughts of the young men of Paris." With firework displays, extravagant fashion, circuses and carousels, Paris at the time, for the rich at least, was all about enjoyment. During les années folles, upper-class American tourists took the steamer to Normandy and then the railway to Paris, drawn to France, writes Harvey Levenstein, a historian, as "a land that was free from American puritanism, where the pursuit of pleasure reigned supreme".</p>
<p>Nor has miserabilism discouraged the French preoccupation with beauty and taste. France does not wear its gloom like a dreary accessory. On the contrary, its culture delights in elegance, sensuality, quality and form: the exquisite hand-stitching on the haute-couture dress; the immaculately glazed tartes aux framboises lined up in the pâtisserie window. The aesthetics of daily life, the art de vivre, remains a source of both grand gestures and small stolen pleasures. It is no coincidence that the two biggest luxury-goods groups in the world are French.</p>
<p>Modern French culture may not have supplied great writers to rival Hugo or Molière, and Paris may lack the buzz of New York or London. But it is hard to argue that negativity has stifled French creativity. Would France have brought the world existentialism had Sartre been a cheerful fellow?</p>
<p>The critical impulse has promoted cultural innovation. Both cinema's New Wave and French literary theory were born of critical reconstruction of what came before. Some of France's most creative periods have followed bleak times: the flowering of painting, literature and science after its defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, or of the avant-garde in art and fashion after the horrors of the first world war. Christian Lacroix, a French designer, points out that war and revolution in France have been times of "creative reinventions, the moment new forms of luxury come into play".</p>
<p>Perhaps the French need dissatisfaction and thrive on doubt. "There is a certain pleasure taken in being unhappy: it's part of an intellectualism of French culture," says Ms Senik. "Malaise and ennui are to France what can-do is to America: a badge of honour," wrote Roger Cohen in the New York Times recently. Pessimism does not preclude pleasure. All that sitting around at pavement cafés, looking fashionably discontented, can be fun. Optimism is for fools; sophisticates know better. Bleak is chic--especially when opening another bottle of Saint-Emilion and reaching for the three-tier cheese trolley.</p>
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