Why do billionaires love Wrangler jeans? This is just one of many essential, puzzling and surprisingly heartbreaking questions asked by Yale sociologist Justin Farrell in Billionaire Wilderness, a sweeping new study of the ultra-wealthy who’ve moved to — or at least declared residency in — Teton County, Wyo., as well as the largely Latino underclass that serves them.

Justin Farrell, associate professor of sociology at Yale University, has managed to write a book interesting from acknowledgements to footnotes, but not without significant blemishes.

Farrell brings a good mixture of information and perspectives to his research.

... a carefully researched, Yale-sponsored sociological study in which the possession of great wealth is treated with an almost liturgical reverence, and the possessors are handled like plutonium.

Farrell has double credentials as a Yale sociology professor and a native of Wyoming. That helped him gain access to secretive wealthy residents, and he does a good job in exploring the attitudes not only of the poor — the focus of many previous researchers — but also the rich. He describes their delusions that poor local employers such as builders are friends, and the ironic frustrations of some with arriviste financiers and Silicon Valley billionaires.

The book contains some sections packed with academic jargon, including one about the research methodology underlying the 200-plus in-depth interviews of the wealthy and the working poor who serve them in various capacities.