And so the book is populated by financial, technological and emerging-market entrepreneurs peering down from their mountaintops, as well as the closest cousins of the fortunate few: the elite artists, artisans and thinkers who cater to, study or simply swim in the slipstream of the extremely rich.

The operative word is extremely. Ms. Freeland, global editor at large for Reuters, takes readers to the 60th birthday party of private equity titan Stephen Schwarzman, at which Rod Stewart was reportedly paid $1 million to perform; to a lunch over Long Island-sourced striped bass with 20 bigwig investors at George Soros’s Southampton estate; and to visits with assorted billionaires, including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Russian oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Viktor Vekselberg, and the son of Lakshmi Mittal, the richest man in India.

Carlos Slim, not just the wealthiest man in the world, Ms. Freeland tells us, but by one measure the wealthiest man in the history of the world, makes numerous appearances. Michael Bloomberg and Warren Buffett show up, naturally, as does Bo Xilai, the Chinese elite whose fortunes reversed when his wife was implicated in the murder of a British businessman.

It sounds titillating, but it isn’t. That’s also by design. Plutocrats isn’t a book about the lifestyles of the fabulously wealthy, but rather the global trends the book’s titular class surfed to success. Ms. Freeland isn’t interested here in the “original sins” that allowed men like Mr. Vekselberg to seize control of the Russian economy in the days of privatization (she told some of those stories in a previous book, Sale of the Century) but in locating the plutocrats’ winning instincts in economic, political and cultural contexts.

The result is something resembling a cocktail party at Davos or the Aspen Institute Ideas Festival or any of the other stops on the circuit of the mega-rich. The guests are long on intelligence, determination and self-confidence. The affect, as anyone who’s ever watched a TED Talk might surmise, is empirical and dry.

Plutocrats grew out of an article Ms. Freeland published in The Atlantic in January 2011, which postulated the rise of a new global elite and rested on two ideas that at the time I found thrilling. First, that a French banker working in Hong Kong, a Russian mogul decamped to London and an American tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley have more in common with each other than any has with his own countrymen. Second, when masters of the universe identify along class lines rather than nationality, we’re one step closer to the kind of global egalitarianism that Karl Marx might have idealized. A factory closes in the Rust Belt, taking a bite out of the American middle class; a factory opens in Guangzhou, buoying Chinese standards of living. Maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to say that’s a bad thing.

Plutocrats doesn’t deliver any such strikes of lightning, but it’s rife with impressive analysis. In a chapter on the so-called superstar effect—“the tendency of both technological change and globalization to create winner-take-all economic tournaments”—Ms. Freeland glides from the writings of Soviet intellectuals, MIT and Princeton economists and the apostle Matthew to the careers of 18th century diva Elizabeth Billington, Lady Gaga, white-shoe lawyer David Boies, Yves St. Laurent, DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg and Albert Einstein.

The phenomena she describes are often self-apparent. Mario Batali maximizes earnings by selling lunch to Wall Street and cookbooks to everyone else. File-sharing extended pop stars’ reach, but undercut wealth for all but the select few who can use their massive popularity to fuel concert tours. These are not surprising concepts, but the thoroughness with which Ms. Freeland surrounds the ideas is satisfying.

The superstars, of course, are a side order. What we really want to know about is the billionaires who seem to remake the world with every new venture, a group that Ms. Freeland sorts into two overlapping chapters. By and large, she says, the plutocrats seized their fortunes by perceiving opportunities created by revolutionary change. But like the 19th century robber barons, they’ve also been enriched by the reallocation of public resources—rent-seeking, in economic parlance—and sought to influence government policy in service of their bulging bank accounts.

On the subject of revolution: Mr. Soros fled a comfortable childhood in his native Budapest after the arrival of the Nazis, a formative disruption that the hedge fund billionaire associates with his ability to intuit instability in markets others view as robust. Mr. Hoffman sensed that the changes being wrought in Silicon Valley in the early 1990s were an opportunity too great to ignore. Mr. Vekselberg collected privatization vouchers in the early days of the new Russia, while a less-prescient business partner cashed in his chips for a mere $100,000. Aditya Mittal, son of Lakshmi, spent years buying up Eastern European steel mills without much competition.

On rent-seeking: Mr. Slim made his fortune by winning a contract for the Mexican telecom concession that was so favorable it preserved a near-monopoly for close to 30 years. The American and British bankers who rose to wealth and power on the revolution in securitization are inextricably tied to a decades-long movement in banking deregulation.

Just because a plutocrat has made his way by disruption, Ms. Freeland is careful to point out, doesn’t preclude him from eating at government’s hand. Mr. Soros, to name but one example, is the beneficiary of the U.S. tax code, which privileges investment income by levying it at a 15 percent. Nor is a rent-seeker a purely self-interested being. Mexican telephone service improved throughout Mr. Slim’s ascension. Mortgage bonds made home ownership affordable for many more Americans (if ultimately too affordable for too many). Even the do-gooding tech evangelists come in for second-guessing. It’s nice to think that disrupting an old industry will create opportunities (read: jobs) in the new new thing that replaces it, but that much has yet to be proven.

Midway through Plutocrats, many readers will light upon an unpleasant notion: That, to invoke F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous formulation on a far greater scale, we are not like the doers at the helm of the new world order. Ms. Freeland describes her own archetype in thinking about billionaires-by-disruption: public-school-educated students who go on to attend elite universities, thus equipped with the brains and the outsider status that come in handy if you’re looking to change the world. (It helps explain Ms. Freeland’s comfort with these people to know that she was born in Alberta, Canada, and matriculated to Harvard.) Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the richest man in Russia until he bucked the government too hard and wound up imprisoned for tax evasion, draws a sharper distinction: “If a man is not an oligarch, something is not right with him.”

It’s also worth noting that amid a presidential campaign heavy on the rhetoric of the 99 and 47 percents, either candidate fits into the smart outsider formulation. Mitt Romney may be the son of a wealthy man, but he’s an outsider by religion and geography, and recognized a pregnant moment—the rise of the private equity industry—to make his fortune. President Barack Obama, with his two Ivy League degrees and millions in book royalties, fits in with Ms. Freeland’s superstars. “Like the rest of the rising intellectual class to which he belongs, the president is an empiricist,” she writes.

Along with the realization that we are not like them comes another idea, which is that Ms. Freeland is going rather easy on the new masters of the universe. Indeed, when it comes time for her to make a prescription for right behavior, she draws it from the remote location of 14th century Venice. That city ascended to wealth and global dominance because access to fortune remained open. Specifically, she says, because investors in trade expeditions shared profits generously with the merchants they backed, a system which allowed new entrants into the class of the elite. When the city’s rulers locked in their status by placing formal limits on social mobility, Venice calcified and crumbled. Along those lines, Ms. Freeland closes on a piece of advice parroted from former Goldman Sachs senior partner Gus Levy, who described his philosophy as one of “long-term greed.”

That Ms. Freeland’s final words emit from an institution that is above all others symbolic of the global elite may be dispiriting to the 99 percent, but that is probably beside the point. An abiding lesson from Occupy Wall Street is that it’s far from easy to affect change by popular movement alone. In a world in which the very rich drive the biggest changes, there’s really only one thing for a superstar student of disparity to do: Speak to the rich—er, affluent—in a language they understand.

pclark@observer.com

"If anything happened to me," he said, pausing, as if to contemplate the inscrutable darkness of the country he had left behind seven years ago, "it would break my father."

On a Friday in late December, at Ground Support Cafe in Soho, Mr. Khodorkovsky took a sip of his coffee and looked around the crowded room. "We're hoping for an appeal," he told The Observer, trying to crack an upbeat smile. He wore jeans and a heavy coat with a fur collar and had just come from his apartment in Chelsea, where he lives with his wife and 1-year-old daughter. "We're hoping it will bring some better news."

Over the course of a two-hour interview, mixing Russian with English, Mr. Khodorkovsky discussed Vladimir Putin, the FSB and Siberian penal colonies, causing people at nearby tables to look up. "Putin is constantly trying to tie my dad to murder charges," he said.

One of Russia's most successful businessman-and possibly the least ruthless of a ruthless post-Soviet scrum-Mikhail Khodorkovsky was the chairman of the oil company Yukos. With a fortune of some $15 billion, he was the richest man in Russia and the 16th-wealthiest person in the world, until he challenged President Putin for political power around 2000 and Mr. Putin decided to take it all away.

In October 2003, commando troops in black masks arrested Mr. Khodorkovsky on a Siberian tarmac. The young Mr. Khodorkovsky was in his freshman year of college at Babson, in Wellesley, Mass. From there, he watched his father stand trial on tax charges in 2005, resulting in an eight-year sentence in a faraway Siberian prison. Father and son initiated a convoluted correspondence, their letters ferried through attorneys, scanned by prison officials, personal details and emotions necessarily kept to minimum.

Last month, a second trial, this time for embezzlement, resulted in another conviction. Barring appeals or parole, Mikhail Khodorkovsky will remain in prison until 2017. "The judge is just a slave," said Pavel, reflecting broad international sentiment that the ruling was an act of political retribution. His voice clicked up in volume. "The decision was made by Putin."

With his father as Kremlin enemy No. 1, the younger Mr. Khordokovsky has been marooned in Manhattan.

Mr. Khodorkovsky last saw his dad when he visited him at college. It was a month before he was arrested. After starting to recall this memory to The Observer, Mr. Khodorkovsky trailed off and went silent, his eyes scanning the room. It seemed so long ago.

The only child of Mikhail Khodorkovsky's first marriage (he has a half-sister and two half-brothers), Mr. Khodorkovsky bears a strong resemblance to his dad-that calculated, hard-faced expression he became known for as he sat in a steel cage at the front of the Moscow courtroom. And he also possesses the familial resolve-revealed in his father's crisp, focused polemics from Siberian prison, where he has been confined for the past six years. "Honestly, I'm pretty angry," Mr Khodorkovsky told The Observer. "But I don't want to lose hope."

When asked about his family's riches, Mr. Khodorkovsky, whose manicured fingernails sometimes flashed in the overhead lights, said that he did not lead a pampered life, despite reports that his father shuffled considerable assets out of Russia-billions, maybe-before his arrest. "When I was in college, Dad helped out," he said.

"Once I got a job, I started supporting myself. I don't have a luxury lifestyle. I don't drive a Ferrari. I don't take cabs to work every day. I take the subway." He does drive a 2006 BMW X5. But he also holds down a day job, as a project manager at New Media Internet, a tech support company owned by Vladimir Gusinsky, an exiled Russian media tycoon.

On the eve of his father's sentencing, Pavel sent him a note. He did not bother with anything sentimental. Instead, he asked for advice regarding the way to arrange the corporate structure of his own new company, Enertiv, an energy monitoring firm. His father's reply from the Moscow dock: Limit your personal liability.

These communiqués have been as close as the younger Mr. Khodorkovsky is prepared to venture to his homeland, fearful that he might land in prison. "A bag of coke could end up in my luggage," he said. "There is very little recourse in Russia."

Instead, Mr. Khodorkovsky has contributed to his father's defense from afar, organizing rallies in Times Square, meeting with senators on Capitol Hill, forging support from anyone who may put a bug in the Kremlin's ear. Some supporters believe, however faintly, that the current Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, a Putin protégé, would like to release Mikhail Khodorkovsky as a sign of his supposed dedication to modernization and an improved business climate.

Mr. Khodorkovsky also administered the Institute of Modern Russia, a human rights organization underwritten by the Eurasia Fund, and his father's Open Society, which promotes democratic development in Russia. "My dad's fight is for something above and beyond his own freedom," he said. "I still have friends in Russia. They tell me he's not alone. There are many similar cases. They just don't get the media attention."

After picking up a phone call from his wife, Mr. Khodorkovsky hurried home for a photo shoot, the media attention increasing on him as his father was being shuttled back to prison. At a busy corner, Mr. Khodorkovsky pleaded with an off-duty cab driver to take him, smiling broadly, then climbed into the yellow minivan. The streets were piled high with snow, and the traffic moved slowly uptown.

"I've grown very fond of New York," he said, looking through the window at the winter scene as the taxi streamed up the West Side Highway. "You can still find peace. I don't think I'll be moving anytime soon."

A photographer was waiting for Mr. Khodorkovsky when his wife, Olesya, a petite woman with dark hair, opened the apartment door on an upper-floor high-rise. Mr. Khodorkovsky and his wife, who is from the Russian city of Penza, south of Moscow, met through friends in New York. Photos of their 1-year-old daughter were tacked to the wall near the open kitchen. A Christmas tree was positioned in the small living room, near a white dining table. Baby toys sat on the gray modern couch, a hobby horse in the corner. Though the Khodorkovskys own the apartment, it is modest, large enough for the small family, but nothing more. With flexible positioning, one may see the Empire State Building through the bedroom window.

Propped on the couch were several placards that Mr. Khodorkovsky had constructed for his rallies. There was one each supporting his father and his father's co-defendant, Platon Lebedev, a former Yukos official. A third placard read, "Putin, let my dad out," in both Russian and English, the words bracketing a photo of Pavel with his father.

Olesya watched the photographer run Mr. Khodorkovsky through his paces. Soon her eyes wandered, though, toward the placards on the couch, a photo of her father-in-law behind bars, a photo of her husband. "I'm afraid to go to Russia," she whispered.

The photo session complete, Mr. Khodorkovsky sat down on his couch. Talk turned to what he will do when his father is released, whenever that may be. "I always thought I'd fly to Moscow and wait outside the prison," he said. "I want to be outside when he comes out." He gestured toward a bottle of Scotch across the apartment, a bottle of Macallan 18, a present from his father to celebrate the birth of his daughter, delivered through Mr. Khodorkovsky's grandparents. "I haven't opened it up yet," Mr. Khodorkovsky said. "I wa
nt to sip it together. We have a lot of catching up to do."

editorial@observer.com