Firm Not Afraid to Discuss Burden of Nation's Wealthy.

A century and a half of managing other people s money hasn t made U.S. Trust Corp. afraid to take a risk.

The firm, with $91 billion under management, shows its moxie in a new advertising campaign which speaks sympathetically to that most derided of social classes, the rich.

The burden of wealth is something few understand unless it actually rests on their shoulders, declares the message running in many up-market publications. How can you explain to other people the fear that your children might never need to work? Or the incredible pressure of trying to protect a lifetime s worth of missed weekends and vacations?

This is a gutsy position to take. The ads might as well wave a matador s cape in the face of the nopopulists who make a pastime of demonizing the wealthy even, as sometimes happens, when the jeerers and the sneerers are sitting on a pretty big pile themselves.

I grant you, when the ads seem to want to cast the high-net-worth set as victims of their own good fortune, they stretch credulity. Consider, from the U.S. Trust copy: You re expected to fight your way through a zillion e-mails and voice mails each day, just trying to hang on to your sanity, your ideal weight and your quality time with your family. If you must face hardships in life, that s the kind you want.

Worthy issue

But I m not here to take potshots. To my mind, the ads broach a subject that deserves more attention than it gets.

As the headline on the advertisement puts it, Money is not the end of worry. It is the beginning. When you apply this to 21st century society as a whole, as well as to its wealthiest denizens, it hits home. The way we think about prosperity needs an overhaul.

The United States and some other parts of the industrialized world swim in a sea of spectacular abundance. While poverty and inequity have by no means been eliminated, the developed world faces a compelling need to recognize what might be called the Prosperity Problem.

Its symptoms surround us. Look no farther than the nearest highway, plagued by traffic problems so virulent they are making millions sick and tired, in the words of a recent cover story in U.S. News & World Report.

Or take the California power crisis, a world class festival of bickering and blame. More generally, ask yourself whether harmony and contentment are rising on anything close to the trajectory of the Gross Domestic Product.

Yet government policymakers and private analysts still work mainly from an old scarcity model, in which not enough is a problem needing to be solved by more.

When the stock market soars to new heights, as it did at the end of the 1990s, the only worry that people readily articulate is that the good times might not last. The question we shy from is how to understand the bull market s enduring effects.

Opportunity knocks

Futurist Herman Kahn wrote in his 1982 book, The Coming Boom, We seem to be on the threshold of a unique American opportunity and should use it to the utmost.

So the present cascade of riches wasn t unforeseen. Yet when people consider what to do about it, we act almost stunned. Political battles over taxes and the federal budget seem little more than an ideological tug-of-war over who gets to hold the purse strings. The latest outcome of these labors, the 2001 tax bill, is a convoluted mess.

Much greater things than that are possible. Think, for example, of the system of U.S. colleges and universities, drawing students from every corner of the world, that has grown up on a diet of both public and private money. Sure, there are problems on campus.

Public discussion about prosperity in the United States all too often bogs down in a soupy swamp of envy and guilt. If any individual or entity can lift the conversation out of this morass, it will contribute something valuable. To U.S. Trust, I d say, credit is due simply for raising the subject.

Chet Currier is a columnist for Bloomberg News.

Keep Flash Out of Investment Products

Unlike automobiles, shampoo and other consumer goods, a personal-finance product doesn t need a catchy name to succeed.

You can see that with a glance at the merchandise found in any brokerage office. Variable annuities. Unit trusts. Or would you like to see something in a closed-end fund?

If you tried to sell cosmetics or soft drinks with clunky monikers like those, you d be out of business in a week. When investing is involved, different principles apply.

Indeed, whoever picks the names for new money-management vehicles seems to delight in pushing the limits of insipidity.

What may have been the all-time low in financial-product naming occurred in the early 1980s, when the idea first arose of self-directed retirement plans sponsored by employers for their employees. If the namers had been content with dull mediocrity, they could have gone with some variation on defined contribution plans, from the trade jargon. But they wanted something even less inspired.

I ve got it! somebody said. Let s call these things salary reduction plans. The label could claim an element of accuracy, inasmuch as the payroll deductions used to make the setup work reduced the participants gross pay for tax purposes, along with the take-home amount on their checks.

Alas, the concept of salary reduction failed to catch the fancy of the nation s working stiffs. If I m at all representative, our cherished goals lie mostly in the other direction. So in short order the commonly accepted name for these plans reverted to sections of the law that authorized them 401(k) and 403(b).

The story of 401(k) and 403(b) plans since then is the stuff of history. It proved that the right money-management idea at the right time could attract $1.7 trillion in its first two decades with a name that is nothing more than bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo.

Every now and then, some maverick tries to break out of this mold, usually without success.