The rich are different from us; they have worse taste.

Well, the “super rich” do, at any rate, and they are the subject of CNBC’s welcome documentary (though it should really be a series), airing Thursday at 10 p.m., “Untold Wealth: The Rise of the Super Rich.”

There is a scene in which a 43-year-old hedge fund executive named Anthony Scaramucci is seen rising at dawn in his Long Island mansion, frighteningly awake and ready to do battle in the canyons of downtown Manhattan. Before you know it, he’s dressed and, armed only with what CNBC reporter David Faber calls a “liquid breakfast” (a bottle of water grabbed from the fridge), he’s in the back of a car and on the phone talking to a client in Tokyo.

What grabbed my attention, though, was the enormous gold harp in the corner of an adjacent room as he made his way out the front door. Had a flesh-and-blood nymph been asleep on top of the thing, or dangling from it in a particularly recherché yoga pose, I might have understood the attraction. But left to itself, the ridiculous bauble was merely a hollow joke on its chipper-faced owner and his $80 million. Was someone actually going to play the thing?

Of course, the reader should understand that this column is being written by someone so financially illiterate that when he hears the mysterious phrase “hedge fund,” he cannot prevent the image of an actual hedge, along with the possible need to clip the thing, from entering his mind.

But let’s get to some facts, of which this program boasts a few. In 1985, when Reaganism was booming and otherwise well-dressed women wore sneakers to work rather than undergo the hard discipline of wearing high heels even at a time when the subway train floor had holes in it, there were precisely 13 billionaires in America. Now there are more than 1,000 of these creatures. Furthermore, 49,000 American households carry between $50 million and $500 million in wealth, with 125,000 more households in the $25 million to $50 million range.

In 2005, the top 400 earners in America collectively piled up $214 billion, more than the GDP of 149 nations, while the salary of the average American was a doleful $26,352, that last digit presumably representing his Christmas bonus. As to those enigmatic hedge funds, surrounded by old, bald gardeners with shears in hand, they collectively “manage” $2.6 trillion in wealth.

W.H. Auden once complained that too many Americans looked like “adult babies.” He might have added that a lot of these baby faces turn out to be tycoons. Take Glenn Stearns, for instance, a fabulously wealthy CEO interviewed here who looks as if his secret ambition is to play in a rock band. Then there’s sleepy-eyed Tim Durham, the 45-year-old CEO of Obsidian Enterprises, who made his fortune in leveraged buyouts. Mr. Durham owns about 70 cars (Rolls, Ferrari, Bugatti, etc.), but seems uncertain as to where exactly all of them are. He owns a private jet, of course, along with a yacht and about 10,000 TV screens. Overall he seems to be a bit of a bore. The jet is prized chiefly as a time-management device, while the yacht, which is moored in Miami, is an expensive plaything he’s obliged to visit three or four times a year just to ensure he’s getting his money’s worth.

For a historical perspective on this new “gilded age,” Mr. Faber interviews Ron Chernow, the biographer of John D. Rockefeller Sr. and J.P. Morgan. Mr. Chernow points out that the “toys of the rich” don’t really change very much over time: The private railroad cars of yore give way to private jets, and so on. What does seem to have changed is what the super rich put into their bodies. Most appear to be fitness freaks who live on bottled water, whereas black-and-white footage of the robber barons of old rarely shows them without a stogie between their lips. In other words, these new guys — and they are almost entirely guys — are likely to be around forever.

The basic thrust of the program is that the super-rich — hedge-fund managers, private equity partners, entrepreneurs, and real estate tycoons — have so far outpaced the rest of us that they have become a species unto themselves. To a large degree, they are a tribe whose chief task in life is the business of “keeping sco re” with their peers. According to 69-year-old hedge-fund manager Oscar Shafer, hedge funds were once regarded as the financial world’s version of pornography, but are now machines for making extraordinary amounts of money. (There has been “no other profession, then or now, where you could make so much money,” he says.)

As a result, more and more billionaires, at a loss for what to buy next, have begun to turn their attention to philanthropy, and organizations such as Tiger 21 have emerged to help them figure out what to donate to whom, starting with a sizable fee paid to Tiger 21 itself. According to the program, over the next 50 years the richest Americans will donate an astounding $27 trillion to various good works. This is obviously terrific news, but against it has to be weighed the effects of their own businesses on society at large, how they made their money (Bill Gross, the billionaire head of Pimco Investments, accuses hedge funds of being practically “highway robbery”), as well as the wisdom of their philanthropic choices.

With so many “super rich” people around, we now have the poignant phenomenon of “the middle-class millionaire,” for whom Laurel Touby, the founder of the Web site MediaBistro.com (she sold it for $23 million last year), emerges as the chief spokesperson. Left with about $10 million after taxes, Ms. Touby discovered that, in New York at least, being a millionaire 10 times over isn’t enough to engineer a significant change in one’s lifestyle. Thus, she still lives in her roomy walk-up loft in Brooklyn, because purchasing an equivalent space in Manhattan, minus the sunlight, would take about $4 million.

As one of the “poorer” people on the program, Ms. Touby also seems to be the most human. That’s probably why there are books (as opposed to endless gadgets) in her apartment, no harps, and she has some taste. Along with Hal Steger, the show’s bona fide beggar (net worth: $3.5 million), she still seems to be in the flow of life, as opposed to weirdly isolated from it inside the billionaire’s bubble.

bbernhard@nysun.com