The trouble with diversity: two great liberal preoccupations--our celebration of cultural difference and the fight against inequality--go hand in hand, right? Wrong. Incredibly wrong.

"THE RICH ARE DIFFERENT FROM YOU AND ME" IS a famous remark supposedly made by F. Scott Fitzgerald to Ernest Hemingway, although what made it famous--or at least made Hemingway famously repeat it--was not the remark itself but Hemingway's reply: "Yes, they have more money." In other words, to Hemingway, the rich really aren't very different from you and me.

Fitzgerald's mistake, he thought, was that he mythologized or sentimentalized the rich, treating them as if they were a different kind of person instead of the same kind of person with more money. It was as ...

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