Rich snobs like Paris Hilton make other rich people bothered, and most likely entire societies bothered. Well, hopefully a trend of people who worked hard to earn their fortune not passing their wealth to their children will continue.

Being born into wealth helps people advance in life, and for people who have indeed worked for their fortune, as opposed to be being born into it, realize that knowing other rich people helps just as much as being rich. This is why people like the Late Body Shop founder leave relatively very little material to their children.

Many of these rich do not come from riches. They are self-made, and generally the self-made have a different attitude to money - or specifically, the acquisition of money - compared with those who have always had it. They generally do not, for example, have the “legacy assets” of the old rich - the 4,000-acre pile in Scotland that has been in the family for generations and must be passed on in good nick; or the idea of noblesse oblige that used to go with such assets: the responsibility to the tenants of the land, to the local community. “With inherited wealth, the current generation may simply consider themselves custodians for the time being of the family wealth and will follow the path laid down over many generations,” says Stuart Chappell, director of Barclays Wealth. “With self-generated wealth, it is the responsibility of those who made the wealth to decide what is to happen after they are gone. It is more likely that the creators of new money will feel that those who follow them should not be ‘feather-bedded’.”

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