Time has made an anachronism out of some of the happy housing market stories that “The Middle-Class Millionaire” tells. About an exemplary developer in Deer Valley, Utah, whose daring they admire, the authors write: “The only thing that kept him afloat financially was the health of the real estate market at the time. As his own personal home rose in value, he refinanced his mortgage at least three times, using each occasion to pull out more cash to live on.” And although the book means to celebrate this man’s ingenuity in creating a fractionally owned “residence club” for skiers, its account of business moxie has taken on the sound of a cautionary tale in the current era of bursting housing bubbles.  “The Middle-Class Millionaire” is about more than the existence of the title’s not quite new demographic group. (Mr. Prince is also a co-author of “Cultivating the Middle-Class Millionaire.”) It’s also about that group’s set of economic demands. Defining middle-class millionaires as the self-made heads of households worth $1 million to $10 million (including the value of a primary residence), the authors sharply characterize that group. They maintain that the middling rich are more “referentially influential” than wealthier millionaires because they mingle and name-drop more. And the true middle class is more conventional and more cautious. But the brash middle-class millionaire is the guy who, on his daily two-hour bike ride, annoys his friends by taking constant phone calls as he pedals. He spends nearly 30 more hours working each week than his middle-class counterpart does. And he believes “that most problems can be solved with a mix of creative thinking, the right people and an open wallet.”  This person offers tremendous opportunities to those who know how to accommodate him. If the middle-class millionaire can pay his way to the front of a line, he will. The book abounds in examples of new services created to make him feel important.  There are doctors who offer concierge-type medicine; there are life coaches who counsel busy movers and shakers about their priorities. There is a “360-degree circle of support,” one that involves lawyers, financial advisers, personal trainers and all manner of assistants, for those willing to subsidize these services. The authors sound very much available for consulting and coaching when they maintain that any busy, rich individual could benefit from such advice.  What about everyone else? What happens to the patients who can’t pay a $20,000 annual retainer for V.I.P. medical care? “The Middle-Class Millionaire” does not overburden itself with those questions. But it adopts the trickle-down theory that a wider public will eventually benefit from such innovations as they become accepted and affordable. The high-end, innovative electric car now being introduced by Tesla Motors, the authors say, will pave the way for more affordable and widely produced versions eventually. But only after middle-class millionaires are finished test-driving and talking about them.  Among the other examples cited here is that of the private electrical generator, which is becoming increasingly popular in hurricane zones. If the need for these is indisputable (“the collection of chilled wine may go bad”), so is the fact that they were once prohibitively expensive. Now that the generator idea has caught on, the book brightly cites a 60-month financing plan in Boca Raton, Fla., “with payments starting at $299.” It should be noted that even when the book was written, 78 percent of middle-class millionaires were “very or extremely concerned about their ability to maintain their current financial position.”  The authors themselves seem to have little to worry about in this regard. They are walking embodiments of the middle-class millionaires’ self-congratulatory mind-set. Mr. Schiff wrote the popular “Armchair Millionaire” and has a Web site by that name. A blurb on the Web site says that that book’s investing strategy “works in good markets and bad,” even if the blurb happens to come from Mr. Schiff himself. And Mr. Prince is an editor of the magazine Private Wealth: Advising the Exceptionally Affluent and a columnist for Elite Traveler.  If this book omits a stupefying chapter on the glories of luxury airplanes, that’s not a favor to the reader. It’s because Mr. Prince is already an author of “The Sky’s the Limit,” a whole book about private jets and their owners.  The Rise of the New Rich and How They are Changing America  By Russ Alan Prince and Lewis Schiff  The Books of The Times review on Feb. 15 of “The Middle-Class Millionaire,” about a new demographic group that can afford expensive new personal services, overstated the cost of concierge-type medicine. Patients pay a retainer of as much as $20,000 a year, not a month.  A version of this review appears in print on , on Page E36 of the New York edition with the headline: Millionaires Are a Dime a Dozen. Today's Paper|Subscribe
Who is the middle-class millionaire? For starters he or she is someone whom Russ Alan Prince and Lewis Schiff, authors of this woefully ill-timed book, would like to flatter.