Old Money, New Money, and everybody else

In the book The Great Gatsby, the people can be divided into three main groups based on their wealth. The  first group, old money, are the people who have had lots of money for many generations already. They are also characterized to go to the prestigious Ivy League schools. A real life example of these old money people would be the Rockefeller family. They have garnered a huge sum of wealth and are connected with many buildings and companies. The other group of wealthy people, the newly rich, have no had this history of great wealth. As they are newly rich, they don't know how to spend their money wisely and just recklessly spend, like Jay Gatsby. This is the opposite with the old money. While they do spend, they just don’t spend as much money. These people make their money off investing or maybe found a huge pool of oil underneath their land. Some like the Du Point family made their money off gunpowder during WWI, taking advantage of whatever item was selling or popular at the time. Every old money family were at one point new money, but as the money was passed down, they became known as old money. The last group are everybody else. They are the people that aren't rich with old money or new money. People like the Wilsons who don't live in mansions and barely make enough to survive. The people in this group strive to get at least some money to get out of their current situation and enjoy some luxury.

The newly rich will strive to be part of the old money group as it carries a new degree of respect and honor. They want to amass enough wealth to be able to pass down the money from many generations and create a legacy. New money seems to come from hard work while with old money, it can just be from an inheritance and you didn't really do anything to earn that money. Like we discussed in class, new money can come from getting lucky and striking it rich while you can get lucky to be born into a family with a lot of wealth. Personally, I would respect new money more unless the old money people did something significant to add to their family's wealth. An example would be Nick, he decided not to use his family's money to try to be successful in the bond business as he wanted to do it independently. Right now, he would probably qualify as "everybody else" as he hasn't become successful enough to be in the "new money" group. They came from probably an average person to working hard and amassing a huge sum of money.