Want to Rule the World? Be Male, Go to Yale, Join 'Superclass'

If you want to become as influential as Bill Gates or Stephen Schwarzman, follow these tips:

Be born a male baby boomer, preferably of European stock. Attend an elite college. And don't forget to be rich and lucky.

David Rothkopf offers that facetious yet accurate assessment in ``Superclass,'' a brainy guide to what the subtitle calls ``the global power elite and the world they are making.''

Rothkopf is a Davos diehard. He is fascinated with the people who run governments and corporations, move financial markets, shape opinion through the media and religion, and deploy military forces -- be they NATO soldiers or suicide bombers.

No stranger to the high and mighty, he served as deputy undersecretary of commerce for international trade under U.S. President Bill Clinton and later did a stint as a managing director of Kissinger Associates.

The superclass, as defined here, consists of men (and far too few women) who have amassed so much wealth and power that they are driving globalization -- by default, not by conspiracy. This is the cadre of CEOs, bankers, politicians and billionaires whose Gulfstreams flit from one pocket of wealth and power to another --from the Upper East Side of Manhattan to London's South Kensington and on to Dubai.

``Linked together by common interests, a common culture and private aircraft, these islands become a glittering, superpowered archipelago amid oceans of aspirants and of the disenfranchised,'' he writes somewhat breathlessly.

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