A quick update on avarice in America and beyond

America’s rich, says a top expert on the wealthy frame of mind, are becoming “irrationally defensive.” Last week, at the annual American Express Luxury Summit in Palm Beach, pollster Jim Taylor reported that the Occupy movement and the escalating “divisive argument over economic fairness” have a quarter of the nation’s top 1 percent “worried about being disparaged for being financially successful.” Two years ago, 43 percent of Americans making over $450,000 a year liked having “others recognize them as wealthy.” Today, just 30 percent feel that way. The nation’s rich, laments Barron’s business writer Richard Morais, seem “too afraid to even be seen in public.” The “demonizing of the wealthy,” he’s warning, “has finally reached a dangerous tipping point for the nation.”

CEOs take risks. That helps explain, they love to remind us, why they deserve all those big bucks. Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas-based chief exec who tops one of the world’s largest gambling empires, should really relish risk. Who puts more at risk, after all, than a professional gambler? But Wynn turns out to be a little bit “risk-averse” — with his own personal future. Wynn’s latest CEO contract with the gaming corporation he runs guarantees him a $258.4 million “golden parachute” if some other gaming company buys up Wynn’s operation and chooses to bounce him as CEO. In 2011, the Las Vegas Review Journal reported last week, Wynn took home $16.5 million, the year’s third-highest paycheck in the Las Vegas metro area . . .

Can you be super rich and a couch potato at the same time? The good people at Bang and Olufsson, the luxury electronics company, seem to beloieve so. They’re going after the mega-millionaire couch potato market. B & O is currently hawking a 103-inch plasma TV that targets deep pockets who don’t want to have to move once they’ve plopped down for boob-tube time. This Beovision 4 model rests on a “unique motorized stand,” one reviewer notes, and the unit’s remote lets the user “tilt and turn” the screen “to face you wherever you sit in your room so you don’t have to change your seat.” The total package cost: a sweet $104,000.

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