Thirteen thousand dollars a month is not the rent I was raised to pay. When I let it slip to my mother what I’d be paying, she just said, “Oh, Michael,” in exactly the same tone she’d have used if I’d informed her that I’d just run over the neighbor with a truck or been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Thirteen thousand dollars a month might be a record rent in New Orleans, but it was really just the ante.

We’d been there only three weeks when the first bills arrived. Utilities were $2,700. That turned out not to include water, which was another $1,000. Think of it: $1,000 a month for water you don’t drink. (The drinking water came in truckloads from a spring-water company.) How did we use so much water? you might reasonably ask. The answer is, we didn’t. The mansion did. The pool, the fountains, the sprinklers that came on in the wee hours to keep the great lawn lush and green—all were suddenly necessary. So, it turned out, was cable, at $800 a month. Who was I to argue? I wasn’t even entirely sure how many televisions we had. Nine, at least. I thought I’d found the last of them when, two months after we’d arrived, I opened a cabinet and found another.

From a Michael Lewis story about the true root of the current financial crisis — the desire to live in a big house. “To blame the people who lent the money for the real estate boom is like blaming the crack dealers for creating addicts.”