In case you didn't know it, "The superrich are doing you a favor"

Continuing a growing trend to idolize the rich as truly special folks who make life itself possible for the rest of us unrich clowns, Jon Markman at MSN offers up a piece titled The superrich are doing you a favor.

I can't quite decide if the title and piece are tongue-in-cheek or if Markman feels at least a bit of genuine awe and idolatry when viewing the megarich. Witness this:

In fact, the superrich spend so much more of their mountains of money, according to a new line of thinking among academics, that they may provide a public service by smoothing out the little dents and valleys in the global economy. As scads of Russians, Chinese, Indians and South Americans have joined the billionaires club due to the rise of emerging markets' industrial might, worldwide recessions have become much fewer in number and far slighter in severity than in past decades.

This makes sense, even if it doesn't make you feel better. For just when many average people in the United States or Europe are slowing down their consumption of goods and services due to the loss of a job or pending home foreclosure, there are an increasing number of superrich worldwide to fill in the spending gap. It's sort of a perverse fulfillment of the trickle-down theory.

In any case, the piece offers up a bowl full of interesting facts on the super rich, including:

• The wealthiest 1 million people in the world account for as much spending as 60 million other households


• Russian natural resources has helped create at least two dozen Russian billionaires and thousands more multimillionaires


• China is now home to 500,000 millionaires


• BusinessWeek reports 83,000 millionaires in India

Man, just reading about all this wealth, all this vibrant and humming economic activity in so many places around the globe just makes me want to....