Los Angeles is home to 41 billionaires, according to the Los Angeles Business Journal’s list of our city’s wealthiest, which came out last week. (Last year we had 37 more than the entire nation of Japan.) According to Forbes, the entire world only has 946. Should our bevy of billionaire’s be a source of civic pride? Shame? Or indifference?

The super-rich always fascinate us. Popular entertainment starring them think “Dynasty” and “Dallas” as classics of the genre try to assure us that the lives of the megawealthy are filled with more unenviable betrayal, crime, and violence than our own. Perhaps that might dampen the envy that’s almost inevitable when contemplating people who could buy out our entire lifetime net worth 100 times before breakfast. But the motives behind journalism about the incredibly rich are, we hope, loftier.

Perhaps we care about the rich based on a sneaking suspicion that they are getting away with something at our expense. Such feelings drive public policy concerns over the accumulation of wealth at the top of the American heap. The very tiptop of America’s wealthy households, a mere 130,000 of them, have increased their share of America’s total pretax wage and salary income from what was only 2 percent in 1973 to just under 7 percent in 2004, and even President George W. Bush has noted this with alarm.

But this doesn’t mean that they are taking from the rest of us, or that the rest of us have no chance to better our circumstances. Income distribution is usually discussed in terms of “quintiles” five equal divisions. Every income quintile in America has gained over the past 35 years, though the highest one has gained a lot more $25,000 in inflation-adjusted annual income vs. $3,000 for the lowest quintile. But we aren’t stuck in our quintile either, high or low. Between 25 percent to 40 percent of us switch quintiles in any given year.

So, however interesting or amusing or aggravating they are to contemplate for curiosity’s sake, America’s incredibly rich have no particular meaning or impact in our own lives except in the sense that they have gotten so rich providing services that enrich or improve our own lives. See, for example, last year’s L.A. billionaires Jeffrey Skoll (eBay) and Gary Michelson (invented a device for improved back surgery techniques).

Taking a close look at L.A.’s richest shows that the rest of us oughtn’t begrudge them their good fortune even the real estate giants among them. Their dominance on a list of billionaires should be no big surprise to any of us who have tried to buy real estate lately, and it might even make us fume.

But when real estate gets more valuable, and those holding it get richer, it’s because more people have decided (sometimes for reasons that prove to be mistaken) that they would like to own property in Los Angeles (or wherever our billionaires’ holdings might be).

Took the risks

Like so many things in the economy, it’s the result of the disconnected decisions of many people as to their desire to own real estate. It’s no fault of the real estate mogul. This might also make it seem as if their wealth is “undeserved.” But they had the foresight, and took the risks, to own something that ended up appreciating in value. That’s not always a sure thing and doesn’t always last forever.

We might be dissatisfied with the overall result of this economic process that is simultaneously no one’s fault and everyone’s, but the steps that lead to seemingly crazy amount of wealth concentrated in some people’s hands are, in principle, innocent.

L.A.’s concentration of the superrich is no “Chinatown” situation, where the water we get is something consumed that others can’t have. Human wealth keeps rising, and is no zero-sum game: People become rich in America, for the most part, by selling products or services other people willingly pay for, or by owning assets that other people choose to value highly. Because of increases in technological know-how in everything from agriculture to zinc mining, and improvements in everything from the quality of goods to our techniques for shipping them and managing how we transport and sell them, immense wealth has been created that benefits us all. Wealth isn’t only manifest in piles of cash it’s in every way our lives are made easier, more pleasant, and more option-filled.

Look at the lives of even the bottom quintile of American income today compared to the richest a century ago, and think of all he conveniences and life improvements we have access to, from better quality food to air conditioning to TVs to computers. On this path of economic improvement and wealth-creation, some people undeniably get richer faster than others sometimes, as contemplating L.A.’s billionaires shows us, much richer and much faster. But there is no need to resent them for it. Along the way, the system of relatively unrestricted private property ownership and markets that has made L.A.’s rich so very, very rich benefits all of us even if we’ll never get within yacht’s distance of their billions.

The same principle that allows us to own our home, our business, our car, or even for us renters to make a mutual deal with a landlord that will be respected, is behind billionaires’ wild wealth. L.A.’s billionaires need be neither source of pride or shame just another spectacle to be fascinated by, or ignored, as we please.

Brian Doherty is a senior editor at Reason magazine, based in Los Angeles. He also is author of “Radicals for Capitalism.”